Love and Fury (5 page)

The first blow to my father's assurance that he still had what he called “a long ways to go” came with the news of his brother Francis's death in his early eighties. My father said, perhaps looking for an explanation, since their three older siblings were all healthy and strong and well into their nineties, “He was a bitter man. I don't know what happened to him, but he became a bitter man. I don't know. Did he strike you that way?”

“Well, he was a POW, after all. I don't think the Nazis treated their prisoners very well. Who knows what happened to him?” I also didn't think that his bitterness, whatever its source, accounted for his dying; there were plenty of bitter nonagenarians in the world.

“The only thing he ever told me about that was how, whenever a new commander took over the camp, he had to kneel down and pray in front of him. He had to say the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, with the translator there, I guess, to prove he wasn't Jewish. Francis had the Hoffman hair and he was pretty dark and Hoffman is a Jewish name. Except for that, I never heard him complain about it. But I guess that's not the kind of thing you talk about.”

That's always been a long list in my family: “Not the Kind of Thing You Talk About.” On it is the disappearance of Francis's daughter, Joanne. My cousin Joanne was my first love. Our babysitter, she made my brother Bobby and me laugh, think, wonder, and question. When we were small, before Bobby weakened and needed braces and then a wheelchair, she babysat when my parents went out to play pinochle or canasta with the neighbors. She always brought her portable record player that looked like a plaid suitcase and the latest 45s, and she danced and sang along with the Platters, Fats Domino, and Elvis. Soon we were doing it too, not dancing exactly but throwing ourselves around, goofy, laughing, just between imitation and mockery, weirdly uncomfortable but deeply pleasurable. We kept catching each other's eye as if to say we knew how weird this was but it was fun so who cares? I was too young to have a name for the charged erotic atmosphere of my cousin's innocent sixteen-year-old rapture, but I'm sure that even as a seven-year-old I took more than aesthetic pleasure in Joanne's thrilling femininity. Especially the night we sat at the kitchen table with her while she painted her fingernails: I had only ever seen my mother perform this ritual, with its alarming but pleasant smell, its fierce concentration, its thorough transformation of utility to beauty. If she was not already, or not quite, my cousin Joanne was becoming, joyously and giddily, a woman.

We each got a pinky, Bobby first. As she finished painting her thumb, Joanne showed us how to use the lip of the tiny bottle to remove extra paint and how to smoothly apply the bright red polish evenly, starting at the cuticle. I watched Bobby and I thought I could do better. I wanted to be better than Bobby at everything; I think that as his older brother I thought it was my job. Until soon after, when he began falling down, too weak to get up again, and I tried not to be.

I took a lesson here, I believe, from my father, who played card games and board games with us and only sometimes won. I began to suspect that if my love for my brother meant anything more than sleeping under the same roof (and in different rooms now that he was ill and in a wheelchair), then the exuberance of boyhood and adolescence would have to be tamped down somewhat, just as I would have to sit or kneel to talk to him.

But of course Joanne wouldn't set us against each other by playing favorite. I don't recall which of us had the idea to paint her toes, but she nixed that. I imagine we'd already done a sloppy job on her pinkies.

My mother called Joanne a tomboy, a word that I couldn't quite grasp because it seemed like a compound, and even if it meant a girl who was like a boy, I couldn't figure how the “tom” got in there. Joanne was no stranger to a baseball glove, and liked to play catch with us in the backyard, bringing her own mitt. Still, “like a boy” she wasn't.

And then she just stopped coming. If our parents were going out—usually to a neighbor's house or to my Aunt Kitty and Uncle Forrest's house for pinochle and beer— Bobby and I would jump up and down and yell, “Joanne! Joanne!” but it was always one of my other cousins, one of Aunt Kitty's daughters, who came to babysit. It wasn't that we didn't enjoy our cousins Annmarie or Maryann, it's more that we missed Joanne, and no one gave us any reason why she no longer came over to “mind” us or even visit. Our other cousins, Aunt Kitty's daughters, were sweet enough but would never wrestle or play catch with us.

I must have found out the way I found out most things, by eavesdropping on adults, probably listening to my parents' conversation through the floor register at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. My Uncle Francis had “thrown her out of the house.” That's what I understood as a young boy. That, and the additional information that she “went to live with the coloreds.”

It isn't hard to imagine Uncle Francis in a racist rage. I don't think I saw him more than half a dozen times over the next half century, but each time, somehow, he managed to insert the term “nigger” into the flow of the conversation, no matter what the topic. All through the years of the civil rights struggle, or watching Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Elston Howard play baseball, or Wilt Chamberlain or Oscar Robertson play basketball, it was always nigger this and nigger that.

My uncle disowned his daughter, his only child. She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, still in high school where she met a young man who shared her taste in music, who treated her as the beautiful woman she was becoming, and who was black. Something happened then. My uncle saw them walking down the street together in one version of the story; in another, the young man beckons to her on the dance floor and she joins him and someone tells my uncle. What does it matter? We never saw her again.

I once tried to write a novel based in part on this situation, but I couldn't imagine the life of my cousin afterward, when the African American community took her in, recognizing her as a casualty of the same ugly racism they knew so well. I knew nothing of that life. It was a historical novel; no, worse, a costume drama. I could outfit the characters with garb and accents, always careful to avoid, offset, or subvert stereotypes, but I knew nothing of the ways, the understandings, the culture of black people in that place and time but what I could glean from books, magazines, and the Internet. It was all a put-up job and I abandoned it, having discovered that I was a liberal in the worst sense: I wrote my black characters just like all the other people I knew, white people. I wrote them in blackface.

How could it have been that I grew up in the industrial heartland and in a blue-collar neighborhood of mostly steel-workers and autoworkers—and still I knew no black people. How can that be? The answer to that question lies in the deeply internalized segregation that was the geographical expression of the hatred that had taken my cousin from us. Perhaps it was a liberation for her.

And I realize now, writing this, that my awful vision of Veronica alone and desperate and defeated is the American nightmare, generated and sustained by white supremacists like my uncle.

And my grandfather. My grandfather and his watermelon—it's a summer memory from 1954 or '55. My grandfather sits in his black leather chair by the window onto the alley, his cane hung over one arm of the chair where some of the horsehair stuffing is visible through a brown tear in the leather. Not long before, I'd had my hand slapped for pulling some of the long bristles from the slit. Now, Bobby and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor at my grandfather's feet in his high-top, lace-up shoes before half a watermelon and a long knife on newspaper. We're not allowed to handle the knife. My grandfather gives us each a slice of the melon and we watch as he eats his, making exaggerated sounds of delight,
Mmmm, mmmmnnnn.
After each bite, he spits the seeds out the window, which is shocking and comic and, we know, forbidden. Our grandmother would not approve. Five or six years old—I don't believe we'd started school— we love this moment. We're Pappy's trusted coconspirators, although we can't wait to run and tell someone, “Pappy spit the seeds out the window! Pappy spit the seeds out the window!” And as he does, he says, “Get out of here, black nigger!”
Too-ey!
“Get out of here, black nigger!” over and over.

Bobby and I do it, too, laughing so hard we almost choke. We both know we must not swallow the seeds; a watermelon will grow in your stomach. It isn't easy to spit out only the seeds. Bobby has bits of the pink flesh down his chin and I haven't mastered it, either. To be sure to get the seeds out the window we stick our heads out. Bobby can't say his L's— later he will get after-school help with this—so he says, “Outta here, byack nicker. Outta here, byack nicker.” We mimic our grandfather, laughing and chanting and spitting till the melon is a pile of ribs next to the knife on the newspaper. Our hands, our chins, our forearms are sticky with drying juice.

Once when I'd asked him about Joanne, my father said that the last he'd heard of her, somebody had said she was pushing a baby in a carriage. “The baby was white,” he added. “It was a white baby!” He shook his head as if to say that my uncle had been mistaken, which made me wonder if Joanne's banishment had been a response to a pregnancy, and if my uncle had been led to believe that the baby's father was black. My father seemed to think that it was a shame, not that my uncle had disowned his only daughter, but that he had done so needlessly: “It was a white baby!”

Beyond the murkiness of my cousin's story, there are other questions that I despair of ever fully understanding. How could my parents have gone along with this? Especially my mother. Joanne's mother had died while she was very young, and my mother was without a daughter. Was my mother so powerless to intervene? And how could my father have acquiesced? Francis was his older brother; was there some strict rule of primogeniture at work? “She just disappeared,” my father said, “poof! just like that. I think she sent Kitty a Christmas card or a note once in a while, but she was just gone.”

When my uncle was on his deathbed in Florida, one of my cousins thought she might be able to track down Joanne by means of her most recent return address. “Do you want us to try to find Joanne?”

“Joanne who?”

“Your daughter!”

“I have no daughter.”

A short time after telling my father of Veronica's pregnancy, I sent him a photograph of Veronica and Damion sitting together on our living room sofa. At the time they were living in our house, along with our son, Robert, who had returned from Miami, where he'd been struggling in college. My father called to thank me for the photograph. “But she don't look happy,” he said.

I dodged the invitation to candor, the first of several times I would do so. He was insistent, and right, of course. “I know my granddaughter, and she don't look happy.” In fact neither Veronica nor Damion was happy. They were scared. They were fighting. They were on again, off again. They'd hardly known each other before the pregnancy, and now they were trying to learn how to love each other while living in our crowded house. So my father was, as always, perceptive, but I knew there was a racist element to his concern, and I wanted to be careful not to engage with it. I considered it a sleeping dog it would be best to let lie.

The next time I visited, soon after my father's diagnosis, I saw that he'd tacked the photograph up on the bulletin board beside his chair, which occupied the same spot, in the same room, by the same window onto the alley, as my grandfather's. When I mentioned to my brother that it was nice to see it there, Joe laughed. “When I got home from work the day that picture came, he handed it to me and asked me what I thought. ‘Nice picture,' I said. And then he spilled it. ‘But look at the guy. He's black!' I said that I thought we had established that. But he shook his head and kept saying, ‘He's black. He's black!' I think he thought he'd be Derek Jeter or Obama or something. He figured he'd be brown, I guess.”

Oh come on, you were never raised like that.

My father didn't know the half of it. I couldn't begin to tell him the complex truth of the situation. It saddened me, since we had for the past fifteen years or so been able to talk honestly about our lives. It had taken us both a great deal of effort to reestablish, some years after my mother's death, a communication beyond the sports and weather talk that had replaced, for decades, our lost intimacy. Now, once again, I had a secret I could not bring myself to share with him.

Damion, the smiling, broad-shouldered, warm, funny young man who lived with us, was a felon, recently paroled from federal prison, where he'd served time for dealing marijuana across state lines, and for gun possession. I watched his mounting discouragement as he tried to find work; day after day, following some lead, he would go off hopeful and come home sullen and sad. It was a tight job market, and employers wouldn't give a second look to anyone with a record. After several months he found work refurbishing electric meters. I helped him buy a car to get back and forth to the job. He seemed to be doing all he could, making every effort to turn himself into the father he'd never had.

But he was also facing state charges for gun possession, charges a good attorney would have folded into the previous court case. The court seemed to be stringing him along, continuing his case for more than a year as if ratcheting up the tension, month after month, to see how much he could take. He was about to start a family, and he could be plucked from his life at any moment and sent back to prison. We hired a defense attorney. I wrote to the DA. I spoke to my state representative. Damion and I spoke to a reporter who did a story on his case. Why, we argued, would the state want to resurrect this old charge? His offense had no victim and had taken place before he'd gone to prison. Why negate the changes in his life, changes that are the whole point of sending a person to prison? Why throw him away? Why punish a newborn who needed a father? We were fighting hard on his behalf. Kathi, Veronica, Robert, and I, along with several of our friends, wrote letters to everyone we could think of who might have some influence.