Makeda (33 page)
I looked at my brother.
I could see that he was afraid too, but I could also see that he was in control of himself. He spoke to me quietly without removing his eyes from the faces.
“I want you to turn around and move away as fast as you can. I will delay them and catch up with you.”
“No.”
“Do what I tell you.”
The faces had closed on three sides to within twenty feet of us. The traction of fear slowed time and prolonged its misery.
“You scared, niggers? We know you about to shit your pants.”
“Move, Gray!”
“No.”
“Move, Goddamnit. You get us both killed if you don’t do what I tell you.” Then he looked at me and screamed, “Mooove!”
I turned and took a step away. Only one. Jesus. I know it was only one.
Little more than a second elapsed before I heard an unusual sound, as if a viscid liquid had been pushed with great force through a puncture hole in a rubber tube.
“A-argh.”
Then a low wet sucking sound and the rapid beating noise of receding footfalls.
I turned back around. Gordon lay on the tar pavement in the middle of the well-lighted intersection.
He saw me hobbling toward him and tried to cry the word “Run” but the blood welling from his mouth drowned out his speech. I knelt down and took him in my arms. His eyes, frantic with selfless alarm, implored me to run. The eyes darting in the direction that my retreat was to have taken. Then slowly the panic in them ebbed as his gaze swam away and his fingers lost their purchase on my shirt. His lifeless body sagged into mine.
He was eighteen years old.
The family rode to the cemetery behind the hearse bearing Aunt Clarice’s body in a black funeral home limousine.
“Daddy.”
I held fast to Jeanne’s hand. My father remained silent, looking straight ahead. Her course fixed for her years before, my mother said nothing and stared into the black pile floor of the car.
“David!” my grandmother said reproachfully, but it was of little use.
Life does to us things that life cannot fix.
T
oday, June 26, 2004, is my sixtieth birthday. Jeanne’s birthday falls on August 21. She will be fifty-eight. In October, we will have been married for thirty-four years.
For the last twenty-five years, we have lived in a little town called Exmore located on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a finger-shaped peninsula that stretches southward 200 miles along the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay from Delaware to the lower tip across the mouth of the bay from the mainland city of Virginia Beach.
Jeanne and I came here many years ago in response to a call from an old college friend of mine, Moses Boyd, who told me that he had a started a black weekly newspaper on the Shore and that he needed my help to get it going. Moses was a native of the area and felt strongly about the desperate situation of the black residents who comprise sixty percent of the Shore’s population.
The Shore is an isolated place. Jeanne polled her students at the community college here and learned that fewer than half of them had ever ventured off the peninsula and across the bay to the foreign territory of mainland America.
Slavery, of course, ended here as it did everywhere else, but only nominally it would seem from the appalling appearance of things, where a consistent pittance of a salary can only be wrung from one of two chicken abattoirs, or from the convenience chain store that opened here in order to make capital of the locals’ desperate scramble for work.
Our participation in Moses’s project was to have been temporary, but once our newspaper,
The Bugle
, became effective in advancing the black community’s social initiatives, we found the Shore hard to leave. By then, having worked for so long shoulder-to-shoulder with so many good people here, we were hooked.
Everyone says that the college and the newspaper have made a difference, and that things have improved. In any case, Jeanne and I have come to love it here and have no plans to go anywhere else.
Owing to complications with Jeanne’s first pregnancy, the doctors advised us not to try and have more children after Michäelle was born.
Michäelle is twenty-eight now, and is in the last month of both her doctoral work at Columbia and her first pregnancy, which the newfangled technology tells us will produce a girl in about three weeks.
Michäelle is married to Charles Hobart, an accountant (of all unromantic things). Jeanne tells me lovingly, and not entirely facetiously, that I have been infected with a mild case of chronic asperity and that I, even though no longer young, must try to govern what I say. As usual, she is right. Charles is a good man and he has been a good husband to our daughter.
That is all that should matter.
But that’s not all that matters, somehow, and I am a little disappointed with myself to have to admit such. I am spiritually put together much as my grandmother was. I seem to look for in people, quite involuntarily, that which I never found in my parents, or even Gordon. An elasticity of intellectual tolerance. A taste for the foreign, the unexplored, the unknown. A certain poetic inexactness. The sweet mess of unscripted creativity.
This is what I have looked for in people. What I have
found
is that I, perish the insight, have become a little of what I so intensely disliked in my parents, that is intolerant, and sometimes self-righteously, judgmentally so.
I was as distant from them as they were from me. We were simply different, and there is little more that can be said about it.
But one recognizes and knows and, then, loves the
self
that one finds in another. How else could two people proceed, spiritually affirmed, except by mutual recognition? I found myself in Jeanne and, conversely, she in me. Thus could she
know
me and come to love me.
The tie of blood alone cannot engender love. Only the staged, ritualized form of it. One must really
know
another soul to really love that soul. I have known in my life only three, and here I count myself fortunate: Jeanne, Michäelle, and Makeda.
My father died of congestive heart failure just before Jeanne and I moved here to the Shore. I mourned him in form.
I am reasonably certain that he would not have thought much of what I have done with my life as the managing editor for a small little-known newspaper. It would not have meant success to him. Hence, he would not have understood the pure joy that Jeanne and I felt just recently when the struggling black farmers here, with
The Bugle’s
support, prevailed in their suit against the United States Department of Agriculture on the grounds of racial lending discrimination. Nor could he have understood our despair when the government declined to honor the settlement that it had reached, in bad faith as it turns out, with the farmers. Or perhaps, remembering my grandmother’s accounts, my father might have appreciated all of this as a young man. As it was, he seemed to have died twice, the first death a larger tragedy than the second.
The two of us, my father and I, were never to reconcile.
My mother died a year after my father. It was as if there were nothing else for her to do, my father being gone and all, which—
all
—was what he had been to her.
My grandmother, the great formative figure in my life, died in 1989 at the age of eighty-six. She lived long enough to example her immortal splendid spirit to our daughter, Michäelle, who was thirteen at the time of her greatgrandmother’s passing.
I am here on the Shore working hard for small wages and miniscule notice, clearly not only because of Jeanne, but because of my grandmother’s lasting influence upon me as well. I am happy and fulfilled as I never imagined I could be.
Even now, I can recall, as if they had taken place yesterday, all of our Saturday and weekday talks, including one that took place during my last year of high school. My grandmother had been encouraging my embryonic confidence in the idea of trying to become a writer.
“Live where you are. Success can only be found in your heart. It’s a very private thing, son. What everyone else calls success is usually not that at all, and the people who have what most people call success are often miserable. Don’t be fooled by that. If it doesn’t make you happy, it’s not success.”
Not long after my father’s death, my grandmother would confide to me in the parlor of the house from which she would not, before her death, be budged, “My biggest failure in this life was with my own son. There were things I could not make him see even though he was a devoted son. It was just how he was after the war. Closed and afraid inside, fightin’ so hard he couldn’t afford to look around. Couldn’t let his guard down. My poor David.”
By most any standard, I cannot be remarked to have been a productive writer. While over the years I’ve had several ideas for books, I’ve never been sufficiently motivated to act on any one of them owing to the ideas having been forced out and contrived. Any book based on them would have necessarily resulted in an empty uninspired exercise.
Over the fifteen years since my grandmother’s death, I have, however, worked on and off, sometimes like a stuck stylus, on the book about her dreams of past lives.
Following the blow-up with my father, precipitated by Gordon’s death and the ill-advised disclosures that I made to Dr. Harris-Fulbright of the University of Southern California, my grandmother requested that I not write anything about her experiences until after she, my mother, and my father were gone. She was adamant about this and there was nothing I could do to change her mind, including telling her that no major publisher would consider publishing such a book without her alive to verify its central thesis. Even under those circumstances, I told her, it would be unlikely that a publisher would agree to such a book. Still not moving from the position she had taken, she made a second request that appeared to fly in the face of the first.
“You must promise me that you will see to it that the book is published before these people find Emme Ya.”
She was obsessive about this, and restated it to me with increasing frequency in the months before her death. Her last dischargeable duty on Earth, she held, was to make certain that “
these
people” not be allowed to take credit for astronomical discoveries that the Dogon people had made hundreds, if not thousands of years before. She would not listen to reason. Reality was of little concern to her. I told her that black Americans had almost no influence inside the American major publishing industry and that the industry would likely be little interested in Dogon proofs, even those that had been verified by white scientists like the French team of eminent anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen.
“You see to it, Gray, that this gets done.”
“I’ll do my best, Grandma,” which did not satisfy her. That day, I’d sat where I had sat since I was five—in the side chair that I placed in front of her rocker that was hard, as always, by the sun-bathed front window.
She held lightly in her hands the Ethiopian Lalibela cross as one would an irreplaceable talisman. Though ill by then, she sat unusually high in the chair with her chin elevated as if she were an all-knowing shaman, looking back across the landscape of human experience.
“Gray.” She spoke softly as if she had little time left.
“Yes, Grandma.”
“I think you understand that you are the only person in the world, besides Jeanne, who knows who I am.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Your father would never have understood me. I never talked about any of this to your mother or Gordon. Only to you. You
must
tell the story. Some will laugh at you. You need to accept this. But many will listen.
Our
people. They’re the ones that must be made to know what happened.”
She paused to husband her strength.
“You are blessed, Gray. Not all of us have a larger destiny, but you do. Now, you must heed its command.”
During the months that led up to my grandmother’s death, she endured considerable pain—accompanied by a progressive erosion of strength, but with no corresponding deterioration of her mental faculties.
I made it my business to get from the Shore to Richmond to spend a day with her at least once every week.
We had long talks during these visits, talks about life and its elusive meaning. As often as she could manage, we held our talks in the little parlor at the front of the house. On those occasions when the stairs presented her with too insuperable an obstacle, we held our talks at her bedside.
Knowing full well what lay ahead, she appeared all but indifferent to the prospect of death. On those occasions when she did speak of it, she spoke of it dispassionately— as little more than a portal through which she would cross again from earthly life to the other side, the realm of the spirit world.
She talked to me more expansively than she had in the past about her many “journeys.” She had, it seems, become a Jew when she converted to Judaism as a young woman living in Ethiopia nearly 3,000 years ago. Since then, she had lived several Christian lives, with an indeterminate number of them lived in Ethiopia. Two others—two American lives—had been lived as a slave on a Virginia plantation.
Another, her current life, had been lived as a blind laundress in the little house on Duvall Street in Richmond, Virginia.
She had also lived at least one life as a Muslim—a Moor—in southern Spain. So it was that, at one time or another, she had embraced all of the three large monotheistic Abrahamic faiths.
As my grandmother drew nearer to the earthly death that Christians seem to privately believe to be the end of everything, it became increasingly clear to me, from things she said, what overarching store she continued to place in the tenets of the West African traditional religions she had practiced during one or another of the several West African lives she had lived.
During our countless talks in the little front parlor, she’d once asked me long ago, “Gray, tell me, what do the pictures you’ve seen of Jesus look like? You know, the ones hanging on church walls?” When I hesitated, she’d added, “You know, son, the fence Reverend Boynton and almost everybody else keep staring at.”