Love and Fury (22 page)

As always, as much as they could get away with given the fact that there were so many adults around, the older kids ran after the younger ones, trying to scare them. One young boy, in a skeleton suit from the store, ran past the front steps. “It's the tally bomb!” he cried out, looking to me for help. “The tally bomb is coming!”

I know it cannot be true, and I know that it is simplistic, but when I look at that photograph from the beginning of the Afghan war, I think that any and all alternatives to this, to what is being enacted in this photo, are good by contrast. Why argue about which ones are best? Would the man on the ground do that?

Ah, but if he weren't on the ground, he would be arguing for his position, as he no doubt had lately been doing, with a gun. Does he still believe, now, that there is another life? Now that he wants desperately to take a few more breaths? All I can do, all any of us can do now, is represented in the photo by that desperate running man with his palm held up:
stop!
But to whom is he, to whom am I, to whom are we, speaking? And why? I have no answer, do you? I am only a survivor, one among the many mourners.

I could write a guidebook to Allentown, but it would be filled with monsters. Its pleasures and joys would be secret and taken on the run by children running a gauntlet of post-traumatic adults swinging their fists, their religion, their dicks at them as they stumbled for daylight. Its pleasures and joys would be private and largely solitary: the ice-cold water of the Jordan Creek's rapids; the cool shade under the bell of a weeping willow, a stack of library books next to the couch, even the quiet of the church of an afternoon where I could retreat to incant the rosary and enchant myself with candles in red glass cups in rows and the sweet residue of incense in the air and the understanding faces of the sculptured saints that seemed to say they understood and who held their hands in ways that signaled, “Hush. You don't have to figure out how to say it, kid, I know. I know.” What a relief.

Pleasure. Relief. Not being able to tell the difference is the precondition for addiction. The first time I tried to smoke a cigarette, I almost ripped my throat out coughing! I felt lightheaded and a little sick. I persisted, though. I could learn how to do it the way it was done in the movies and on TV. The way the adults did it. Cool. The way my father did it with me sitting on his lap while he blew smoke rings right through one another! Soon I could inhale without coughing and soon after that a craving began. The relief of that craving I called pleasure.

Why does my father remain such a mystery to me? I don't believe he had a terrible secret he kept from us, or that there is something he took to his grave that is yet to be discovered; it's more that he couldn't find a way to articulate his own complexity, his inner life, his essence. If he sometimes behaved as if he was ashamed, that doesn't mean he should have been. In any case, I think his inability to express the nature and variety of his feelings made me want to at least try to articulate mine.

When he worked at the Boys Club, my father would regularly bring home rubber molds for plaster of Paris “knick-knacks”—first you turned the mold inside out and greased it thoroughly with Vaseline, then you popped it back right side out and poured it full of the mixture of powder and water you'd stirred to a pudding in a mixing bowl. The next day you could easily peel the rubber from the hardened figures and wipe them off with a damp rag. Then they were ready for painting, my favorite part. We certainly had some garish birds and rabbits and squirrels on the shelves and counters of our house!

One day, when I was in second or third grade, I think, he brought home a projector and a small reel of film. The Boys Club hambone team had been to a tournament and won second place. My father, as a counselor, was their coach. He had driven the Boys Club pickup truck with the kids in the back the hour to Philadelphia, and he was outraged that the judges had awarded first place to a team from Philly. As he threaded the projector he went on about how he thought his team had been robbed because he was white. “Couldn't give it to the kids with the white coach. How would that look? Hoo boy, those judges wouldn't have made it out of there alive! And I told them, too. I told the kids that as far as I was concerned, they won. Don't be fooled, I told them. You would have won if you had had a colored coach.”

On the wall a dull rectangle of light with little shapes— dots, lines, streaks—and one permanent line from a crack in the plaster, then there they were, four young black boys in a row, seated on folding chairs. My father stood behind them. He leaned over and said something in one boy's ear. And (I remember this vividly) whatever he said caused the boy to break into a dazzling smile and shake his head from side to side as my father stepped out of the frame.

One boy began, drumming out a basic rhythm with his hands on his thighs. He called out:

Hambone, hambone have you heard?

Another boy joined in, slapping his thighs and chest in syncopation, the beat getting complicated, and responded:

Mama's gonna buy me a mockin' bird.

A third boy added his patting and clapping:

If that mockin' bird don't sing

And the fourth, the boy to whom my father had spoken, exploded in a virtuosic cascade of patting, slapping, clapping, and smacking while he sang back:

Mama's gonna buy me a diamond ring.

The four of them continued through the rest of the lyrics while the beat bounced, intricately braided, and the volume rose and fell, pulsing in a patterned flow.

If that diamond ring don't shine

Mama's gonna buy me a fishing line.

If that fishing line should break

Mama's gonna throw it in the lake.

If that water splash on me

Mama's gonna beat my b.u.t.

My father could not have known, nor would he have had the means to find out, hambone's origin as a response to cruelty, fear, hatred, and deprivation. His admiration for the skill of his team members was genuine, and he didn't understand why anyone might think otherwise. “People say you're not supposed to say they got rhythm. But why? They do! They do!” Had he known that the performance he so admired was a defiance of cultural erasure, he would have been all the more admiring. The drum, any drum, was forbidden. The healing drum was broken; the wedding drum, torn; the full-moon drum, in tatters; the mother drum, the father drum, splintered; no drums across the gorges, the hilltops, the waters; no signals, no meetings, no stories, no plans of escape or rebellion. And so the body became a drum, the body with its variety of pitches, its many textures, its hollows and surfaces and declivities, its expressive slaps and claps and pops and thumps and brushes; more sounds, almost, than a mouth, and just as much to say to those with ears to hear.

On the same visit to the Vermont Studio Center where I met my friend Letta, I shared a photo of my grandson with a Nigerian painter, Susana. We were in the dining hall, where I thought the food was delicious but where she could seldom eat anything without it upsetting her stomach. “This is your grandson?” Her puzzlement might have been that this gray old white man could be this child's grandfather. Or perhaps she meant—what? Nigerian English is inflected very differently from American, so it was hard for me to be sure what was behind the question. “In Nigeria, we say that your grandchildren are your ancestors.”

“I thought it was the other way round.” I laughed.

She continued to stare at the photo on my phone. She put her hand on my wrist, squeezed so I felt her urgency, pursed her lips and nodded, once.

“No. He is returned. He is your ancestor.”

Once again I am challenged, in collision with a more capacious way of understanding the world that does not discount what language cannot convey, a view that describes time and eternity differently. It felt like stepping away from the wall, out onto the dance floor of the imagination. I have been taught to pretend that the imagination is not real, that it is not my constant companion, not an acceptable way to grasp reality, that it is a way of knowing that is to be left behind. The imagination is off limits to adults. An adult is someone who uses machines, who can drive. And an adult running a machine had better be where that machine is, whether it's a plane, or a lathe, or a saw.

Perhaps my grandfather was thinking of me when, a young man, he lost his forefinger to a circular saw? I still see his stump of an index finger though it is long since dust.

So, I am the ancestor of that hard little breaker boy on a wooden bench in the colliery shattering anthracite into smaller chunks? All right then: from here in the imagination, where these encounters can take place, I bless him. And here in the imagination he wipes a black streak across his face and feels, oddly, strengthened. Maybe he is thinking of a beautiful silk necktie that he saw on someone at church the previous Sunday. “Howdy, Guvnor.”

Perhaps the imagination is the realm where the living and the dead conduct their transactions. If so, then we are in exile from that communion.

Except, perhaps, in dreams.

In a dream, for example, on my mother's last night on earth, her mother, Etta, appeared to me. No doubt the dream was so vivid because it took place downstairs, where I had been just before coming to bed. I had opened the back door for some reason and saw her in the darkened alley next to the house. She passed beneath a cone of light from a streetlamp. I was surprised but somehow not shocked that she was there. “Mammy Etta!” I said, very happy to see her. I had loved her very much as a child.

“Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips then moved it back and forth. “I can't stay long,” she whispered. She put her finger back to her lips and winked at me. And my mother died in the morning.

Or the dream I remembered while holding my grandson on my lap when he was five months old. I cupped his head in my hands, felt the lamb's-wool softness of his hair, nuzzled him, and looked in his eyes. A thrill, not a chill because it wasn't cold, a vibration of some kind went through me as I understood that I had dreamed of this child before he was born. My impulse was to shrug this off as déjà vu, a neurological glitch. However, I remembered that I had written about that dream because it puzzled me. Later, I went back to my journal to find it, prepared, by then, to laugh at myself for being so silly.

Such a strange dream last night. I'm in the backyard when a creature I don't recognize emerges from the bushes. It looks up at me with brown eyes, asking for something. It wants me to hold its head. I can't believe how soft and gentle it is. Its hair is soft as a lamb. I hold its cheeks in my hands, kiss its soft brown forehead. I am almost weeping with joy. What strange and beautiful creature is this?

The date of the entry is September 21, 2006, before we knew Veronica was pregnant, just around the time that D— my dreamt-of ancestor?—was conceived.

Neither Veronica nor I can recall whose idea it was, but I was the one who went to pick up the cake we had ordered for the family celebration of Kathi's successful treatment. I had never been in a bakery like this one before. In a glass display case were cookies and cakes in the shapes of penises, vaginas, sculptured cakes of copulating couples, weird armless and legless female torso cakes with shaved chocolate pubic hair. There was a little plate of bite-size pink penises with a sign above it: DELICIOUS—TRY ONE! There was a binder on the counter with pictures of all the other varieties of indelicate delicacies you could order.