We Were Brothers (12 page)

Last week I spoke of you, as you have read, from a public podium with affection and good cheer. I have not always done so and you should know that. My past, especially my childhood, has become the source of a lot of my speeches and essay writing over the past few years. You know this because I’ve interviewed you for that purpose, like I interviewed Wayland and Bettye and Jeanne. I say this to preface my comments about my suffering your bullying. Here is one of the things I have written—you might want to take a break about now—go get a drink or something. It’s about the bus.

At this point in my letter I recounted the story of our having been downtown to see a movie, our coming home on the public bus, my finding a seat in the back of the bus between two black women, and the repercussions of my doing so. Then I told him:

I don’t have any more to say about bullying and whipping right now, Tom. I’d love to hear your response.

I was happy to hear of your good works and of the generosity and sensitivity you have extended to your black friends over the years. I was glad to hear that you indeed
have
black friends. And I’d be willing to wager that you don’t use the word “nigger” in front of them—and that’s one of the problems I have with you and that word, and why I think you use it mostly just to piss me off. I’ve got a big picture of your calling Michael Jordan a nigger to his face. Or Leontyne Price. Or Wole Soyinka. Tell me more about your black friends. Do you have them to your house? Do you take meals with them? Do you hug them when you see them after a long absence? And you see that’s another problem I have with racism. As a visual artist I am completely dependent on my sight. So is racism, but in an entirely different way. Do you think that Bernard was a racist? Do you think that he could have possibly cared what color a man’s skin is? I wanted to ask him this question. I asked Wayland if he thought that Bernard would entertain my coming to see him after not having talked with him in over thirty years. Wayland wasn’t encouraging and I ended up waiting too long. When I did finally get up my gumption and called, Mary answered the phone and said that I couldn’t talk with him because Bernard had died a few days before.

So please talk to me some more about this, Tommy. It’s important to me.

And another thing. I can tell a politically incorrect joke as well as anybody. I have a lot of problems with being politically correct and don’t think of myself as being so. I see it as so much soi-disant apologetics and a load of happy horseshit. I probably feel pretty much the same way you feel about affirmative action and racial preferences—though certainly not (as you said in your letter) about equal opportunities. By God, my daughters and granddaughters are going to have all the opportunities that your sons or anybody else’s sons are to have or else I will die trying to make certain that they do. I simply cannot accept that one person has access to more opportunity than somebody else based on arbitrary and biased criteria like skin color, nationality, religion, or dicks. Fuck that shit. Imagine that sweet little granddaughter of yours being turned down someday for a job that she is perfectly capable of doing or being denied access to an educational or entertainment facility simply because she didn’t have a tallywhacker hanging between her legs. Or because she had crossed eyes or freckles on her skin. Or only four fingers on a hand. Or was a Baptist. So when you tell me a joke about slapping babies on the butt to knock the dicks off the dumb ones, it rankles me because it offends my daughters—and your granddaughter. It offends my ex-wife. It offends a few women that I have slept with and been in love with. And it offends a whole lot of very close personal friends that don’t have dicks who could chew you up and spit you out because they are so much smarter than you and me put together. But I told the joke to my daughters anyway. And they laughed.

This is a great country, Tommy, as you say. And it is great if for no other reason than it is a place where fair play is at least a possibility. Fair play to ALL people, regardless. No limitations. No exceptions. NO exceptions. That to me is a sacred notion—far more important than any religious precept I know of. And I can joke about any of it up to the point where I start to feel that it is no longer a joke. And your jokes sometimes leave me wondering. I need you to be clear about them with me.

And don’t be too proud of your shit-kicker superiority about things cultural. I like peanut butter better than caviar, too. And since you’ve read your Dante (did you read the Mandelbaum translation, the one I illustrated back in the eighties?) you will understand me when I say that if we can continue this dialogue—in writing for a while longer, I hope—you and I, as brothers, may one day emerge from this morass, once again to see the stars—“
a riveder le stelle.
”

One final note: when I write to you it is not to show off any so-called intellectual “wizardry,” as you accuse me of. I write to you in the same manner, using the same syntax and vocabulary, as I do when I write any close friend—I admit that I don’t write business letters this way. I am not trying to impress you. I am not talking down to you, nor am I talking up to you. This is the way I think. This is my language. This is the way I write, like it or not. During the course of this correspondence I promise you that I will not question your language or correct your spelling. Do me the same courtesy because, if for no other reason, it just ain’t that important.

There are probably things that I haven’t said that I should have, but this has gone on long enough. Ask me questions.

I look forward to your next letter. Until then,

I am, like you,

Just,

Barry

April 24, 1998

THESE THREE LETTERS
are all that there are. Tommy’s one letter was written with a fountain pen in black ink on lined composition paper. His handwriting is a neat, well-paced, almost Victorian script. He crossed out very few words and made infrequent errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar, proving me wrong about his being “inarticulate” and “utterly incapable of correctly conjugating verbs.”

Tommy and his horse, Red, c. 1980

My letters were composed in my word processor on plain white paper. My spelling, punctuation, and usage were no better than his. It is unfortunate that these three letters are the whole of our exchange. For whatever reasons, we did not maintain the correspondence. I wish we had. I wish it had become habitual for both of us. Instead, we talked on the phone. We talked once or twice a month for the next seven years. We caught up on the lives of our children and grandchildren. We told jokes. Lots of them. (You know what PMS stands for? Pass my shotgun.) We swapped tales, both tall and real. We bitched and griped about getting old—it was a recurrent conversation and was always colored with humor. (“Making love at my age,” Tommy once said, “is like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a parking meter.”) We commiserated about the death of our dogs and about our own health and mortality—his cancer, my diabetes. Yet our conversations were never morbid or morose and they rarely ended without laughter and each saying to the other “I love you.”

The first Friday of October 2002, I was in Nashville with my wife, Emily, to give a talk at the Nashville Public Library. As soon as we checked into our hotel room, I called Tommy and we made plans to have dinner that night at his place in Hendersonville. His son Todd was there with his wife, Tonya, and their two kids, Victoria and Olivia. Tyson was at the car races in Talledega that day, but his wife, Danielle, came. Nancy, my brother’s new friend, was there, too, and she seemed to be good for Tommy. We spent several very enjoyable hours talking and telling old family stories.

On Sunday morning we met for brunch at the Union Station Hotel, where Emily and I were staying. Tommy was dressed well and groomed immaculately, as usual, looking like he might have been to church. I watched him at the buffet putting food on his plate that I never thought I’d see him eat, like pork sausage.

Over the meal Nancy told us about someone in her family, her daughter or her niece perhaps, who had adopted a black child, and that my brother had taken on the mantle of being that child’s sponsor and protector. She told us that Tommy would go and pick him up and take him places and do things with him.

After brunch we went out to the hotel parking lot to say our good-byes. Tommy and I embraced, and as we did I kissed him on his cheek and said, “I love you.” He hugged me even tighter and said, “I love you, too, my brother.” Then he put his arms around Emily and hugged her for a long moment, too. Tommy genuinely liked Emily, and she him. Seeing them hold each other like that delighted my heart and melted what little ice that may have been lingering there.

A little before noon Emily and I got in our rented car, waved good-bye one last time, and drove to the airport. Two days later I wrote in my journal: “As the plane gained altitude I began to cry. And the tears come again as I write this: I love my brother. But now that we are here, in our late middle years, all the past ugliness seems to be a dream long ago dreamt. Either Tommy has changed, or I have, but more than likely both of us have. It was hard leaving him, especially as the plane climbed out of five thousand feet and I knew that somewhere in that autumn landscape beneath us, he and Nancy were out for a drive. And I know that the chances of our never seeing each other again alive will loom ever larger the older we get.”

I never saw Tommy again. He died shortly after midnight on Tuesday, July 19, 2005. He was sixty-eight years old, six years younger than I am as I write this. A few years before his death, his bad eye became cancerous and was surgically removed. When Tommy called to tell me about the surgery and to report on his recovery, he seemed downright chipper about the whole thing. He made a joke about his new black eye patch. He thought that it complemented his bounteous white hair and made him look handsome and distinguished. He was right. It did.

His daughter-in-law Danielle called me at eight on that July morning with the news. She said that the cancer had metastasized and had attacked his kidneys, pancreas, spleen, and one of his ribs. She said that his heart gave out just trying to keep up. Whether there was any connection between that cancer and his childhood amblyopia I do not know, but it would seem unlikely if there were not.

During calling hours the evening before the funeral I sat at the far end of the funeral parlor, staying as far away from his body lying in that coffin as I could. Todd and Tyson came to me and asked if I wanted to see their Daddy. I did not. I could not. I wanted to remember him as he was the last time I saw him alive, before the cancer took his eye and gave him that eye patch he wore so proudly.

On the morning of the funeral, I sat with Tommy’s sons and their families during the service and afterward accompanied them on the short and cheerless trip to the grave in Hendersonville Memory Gardens.

Though it wasn’t far from the chapel, we took the funeral home limousine to the burial site. By the time we got there the casket was already on the lowering device and I watched an elderly man wipe away fingerprints on the polished coffin lid. I thought that Tommy would appreciate that simple gesture.

We sat in the shade of a blue canvas pavilion. The air was still and the late morning heat was beginning to tell, especially for those of us in black suits and black dresses. When the preacher finished saying the usual forgettable graveside words, the coffin was lowered into the ground. A few of us threw white carnations on it. When it was time for us to go, Tyson stood up, his eyes red from crying and his face puffed with grief. He took off his black jacket and handed it to Danielle. He picked up a shovel and attacked the pile of dry, ochre colored, stone-studded dirt. He attacked it as if
it
were to blame for his Daddy’s death. He worked with frantic, almost hysterical dispatch. From where I stood he looked like a man not so much filling a grave hole, but a man trying to
save
a loved one who was buried alive.

After the ceremonies the family and friends gathered at Tommy’s house for food, conversation, and reminiscences. Todd and Tyson were genial hosts and even managed a laugh or two at stories told about their Daddy. I stayed as long as I could, but I needed to get my borrowed car back to the friends who put Emily and me up. Emily had to leave earlier in the day, but I stayed over that night and flew home alone the next morning. It was a two-hour flight, so I had that time to sit back and think. To remember. To mourn. To weep. To be grateful that he did not die before we were able to reconcile. And to thank God for that little bit of grace.

TOMMY AND I
ENJOYED
eight years of brotherhood before he left, a brotherhood that was without anger, or recrimination, and without his ever again using the word
nigger
in conversation. That was eight years out of his allotted sixty-eight. Eight years out of my sixty-five. Not very much time for us to reconcile a discordant lifetime. But we did with it what we could. And when Tommy went on ahead, I hope that he left with peace in his heart. I know that the brother he left behind lives on with peace in
his
heart.