And so I wonder now, if I asked you, if you would remember this woman? If, on my journeys away from home, she rang our bell and you answered the door? And what your take of her situation was. Did she accept only pennies and “silver money” from you? Did she refuse dollars? Refuse water. Refuse to temper her hostility.
Sometimes, in my wooden house in Mendocino, with its yellow pine, barnlike slanted roof, I think of her dignity, if she was a beggar. I think of her going from brick house to brick house, in our suburban neighborhood. Behind each door a striving black middle-class family. Men and women who would rarely own more than their own houses and cars in their lifetimes, and know this as success. Women who would feel fear, to think of this woman out on the street—a phenomenon associated entirely with big city or Northern living; men who would speculate, feel embarrassed and surely—one or two of them—prurient. Was this why she never smiled?
Her look, her manner, everything said very clearly: I will never work again. I prefer to beg. If, in fact, she was a beggar, and not an agent sent by the Klan, the White Citizens Council or other white supremacy groups of Mississippi. I used to wonder who slipped “The Eyes of the Klan Are Upon You” cards in our mailbox, which was on the front porch. Could this have been her task? And if so, how had she been recruited? To whom was she, or her children—I always felt she had children—a hostage?
There is a bitterness that does not dissolve when I think of black women begging. I feel their rage, and it is mine too. I am here and you are there, we say to the well fed. Why are we both not on the side of plenty? That is what I want to know, as I look into the eyes of someone who has given everything, if only symbolically, and is left with nothing. And the black woman begging does not let me get away with giving more than is asked. Once, in New York City when it still shamed me deeply to see a black woman beg—not that it still doesn’t, but my emotions have been battered into a more bearable numbness—there was a woman on the corner who reminded me of the stiff-necked beggar who came to our door. She too asked for coins, for “silver money” only. In my shame and do-goodyness I offered a twenty-dollar bill. She chased me down the block to give it back. Grim, un-softening. In fact, clearly disgusted with me.
There has been no response to my letter, which Our Child dutifully delivered. And one is not required. You are someone else now; someone I do not know. It is as if the young man I knew is dead, and you have colonized his early life. I know you sometimes speak of that time in Mississippi among people who loved you, so far away from Brooklyn and the tiny, contentious house from which you fled; but you must realize that the person you speak of is not you. But perhaps this is too bitter. Perhaps it is better to speak of the sadness one feels as the result of directly experiencing any sort of waste, whether in material or human terms. I miss you. We were good people. And together we were good. Allies and friends. Too good to have those years stolen from us, even by our grief.
FINDING LANGSTON
How were we to know Langston would die so shortly after we refused him a ride with us? I remember introducing you to him as if he were my father. I was so proud. He was so seemingly at home in any world. The huge Central Park West apartment we were in, for instance, with its windows overlooking the Natural History Museum. How young we were! Sometimes, thinking of our youth, the image that sums it up is the back of your neck, just after you’d “taken a haircut” and your brown shiny hair was shaved close to the back of your head and abruptly, bluntly, terminated, leaving your neck extremely vulnerable and pale. For some reason, I was moved by this; it always made me think of you as someone who would, and did indeed, stick his neck out. Langston liked you from the start.
I was too shy to notice anyone else, or even to hazard a thought about the politics of the gathering. Writers and poets and agents and editors, I know now. Some famous, some not. But what was fame to me? It seemed too far away even to contemplate. It was winter, I was, as always, longing for a father. How odd life is: Now, one of my brothers is very ill. He tells me, when I visit him in the hospital, that the father I always wanted was the one he actually had. He remembers my father organizing in our community to build the first consolidated school for blacks in the county, which was burned to the ground by whites. Then starting again, humbly, asking a local white man—who might indeed have been one of those who torched the first school—to let the community rent an old falling-down shed of his, until a second school could be built. He tells me my father traveled to other counties looking for teachers, because our county was so poor and black people kept in such ignorance there were no teachers to be chosen among us. It was my father who found the woman who would become my first-grade teacher. My brother’s words are both fire and balm to my heart. Now, in my fifth decade, I know what it is to be deeply exhausted from the struggle to “uplift” the race. To see the tender faces of our children turned stupid with disappointment and the ravages of poverty and disgrace. To think of the labor of Sisyphus to get his boulder to the top of the hill as the only fit symbol for our struggle. I am thankful that, when I went North to college, one of my teachers introduced me to the work of Camus. Sisyphus, he said, transcends the humiliation of his endless task because he just keeps pushing the boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall down again, but pushing it anyway, and forever.
We had the little red bug then, and you were teaching me to drive it, at two or three o’clock in the morning, when there was less traffic on the streets of New York. I loved those early morning hours: Sometimes we would go swimming. We’d have the university’s pool all to ourselves, in the middle of the night, and you taught me the breaststroke (so graceful!) and the sidestroke; and sometimes after swimming we’d go out in your car.
Langston left the gathering, of which he was star, and came down with us, and saw us head toward the bug. What he didn’t know was that the backseat was filled with a large wicker basket we’d bought, our first piece of furniture, and a painting of turtles that proclaimed “We are more alike than different.” Perhaps we should have thrown them out on the street, to make room for him. He was that precious, though we did not fully appreciate that then. He said, Are you going uptown? Hopefully. We said, with a regretful shrug, No, we are going downtown. We did not say there was no space for him. We watched, grimacing—for he had made us laugh, and more than that, feel comfortable—in the high-rise apartment filled with all white people, looking out over Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. He began walking toward the subway. And I shivered, for it suddenly seemed very cold. And he seemed the father I sort of knew. He’d given everything, been history, entertainment and example throughout the evening, telling wonderful stories of his adventures, as his eyes twinkled and the ashes from his cigarette—which rarely left his mouth—drifted down to dust his tie. Now he was tired and needing a ride, as my father might have, and I was going off into a life so different from his, I thought, that he could not even warn me about it, except cynically. As he, Langston, did later, after we were married, when he wrote to me and said: You married your subsidy.
It would be years before I learned of the elderly white woman who’d subsidized his early work, and what a “primitive Negro” she tried to make of him, and of how he became sick from loving and wanting to please her, and needing to grow and be himself. When I read about this, how his health only returned after the last of the money she’d given him was gone, I wanted to return to that cold evening we had spent listening to his funny stories and drag him into a corner and force him to really talk to me.
Too late! Is anything more painful than realizing you did not know the right questions to ask at the only time on earth you would have the opportunity? There were other subsidizers in Langston’s life. Mainly white men who supported and understood him. One of them built him a little cottage near his own house in California. Langston would live there peacefully for months on end. Did you remind Langston of these men? And did our relationship remind him of relationships he had known? And was he saying I did not love you? Or that lo
ve was only part of it?
We were invited to his funeral, and we went. We were husband and wife. It was a party. Like him, it turned us back on ourselves, while being superbly—with its lively music and energetic poetry reading—entertaining. At this “celebration” and for years afterward I thought of his words, especially as you, unfailingly generous, supported me, supported my work. Read it, critiqued it, praised it, ran off multiple copies of it on the big Xerox machine in your law office. Sat in the audience wherever I read it with the biggest glow of all on your face. I had never experienced such faith before.
And now, thinking of the two of us sitting evening after evening reading Langston’s stories and his autobiography to each other, as we mourned his passing and as Mississippi howled all around us, I hope this was the faith, the “subsidy” of spirit and work, that Langston had also, in his own handsome youth.
BURNED BRIDGES
Last night a friend and I were on our way to see a movie, in her small, far from new car. A helmeted policeman on a motorcycle pulled her over. “What did I do?” she asked. He did not respond to her question: “Is this your car?” he gruffly questioned her. She is a middle-aged black woman, portly, bespeckled and in dreadlocks. For fifteen minutes he grilled her about whose car she was driving and whether it was stolen. I sat in the car, leaning out the window. I had such a feeling of déjà vu. Should I get out of the car and stand beside her? Or should I remain in my seat? Even though this was San Francisco in the Nineties and not Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Sixties, I found myself suddenly grappling with a dilemma I thought we had put to rest twenty-five years ago. What is the proper behavior during confrontations with obviously disrespectful, hostile police? If I got out of the car and questioned what was happening and was ordered to get back inside, and refused, what were likely to be the consequences? How could they be dealt with nonviolently, when he was the only one of us armed?
My friend’s face was tense with suffering as she rummaged through a rather messy glove compartment for proof of ownership of her car. Having called in her information and verified ownership, he explained why he thought her vehicle might have been stolen: a sticker on her license plate seemed haphazardly placed.
Throughout their exchange the policeman, white, solidly built, with cold eyes and a graying mustache, showed no sign of human feeling.
“And why would I have stolen this battered little car,” my friend said, when we were finally free to go. “And not a new BMW or a Mercedes-Benz?”
On we went to see The Bridges of Madison County. A wonderful movie that reminded me of you, of us, the summer we met in Jackson, Mississippi. When I think of that summer I think of how perfectly my hair was straightened, and how neatly shaped. I think of the tiny, sexy dresses I wore. Dresses that bared my shoulders and rose above my knees. Dresses that said “Africa” in a seductive whisper, not like the dresses I would later wear, that I made myself, from yards of vibrant fabric that made me feel like a member of a distant tribe. I shaved legs and underarms in those days, and was silky smooth all over. I had barely enough money to exist, but I did not care. Being in the South, in Mississippi, was what mattered. Not missing what was happening there. And almost immediately, we met.
It was like a dream, really. And also karmic. I was one of those who complained bitterly about white people having the nerve to be in “our” movement. And yet of course I noticed you immediately, as a man. Your warm congenial manner in the café next to the law office on Farrish Street, as you shared lunch with your colleagues. Your laughter and flushed face above a crisp, cool blue shirt. Later you would tell me you noticed me too. I would have been in the company of Larry,*the lawyer for whom you worked, and whose errands you were required to run. He had picked me up at the airport, and remained near, “showing me around.” An arrogant, rich Yalie in his thirties whose father owned a chain of hardware stores, Larry drove a blue Mercedes convertible as if he were lord of the world, and would later squire me about in it; as if this were something Mississippi saw every day: a handsome, suavely dressed white man and a fashionably dressed young black woman who was actually perplexed to wind up, briefly, in his bed.
But there was no feeling, with Larry. Besides, he was engaged, I had thought, to the black woman who partly inspired me to come to Mississippi in the first place. Which made his seduction of me all the more puzzling. Not to mention my sleepwalker’s response. I don’t even remember having sex with him. I remember only a moment of standing next to a motel bed on which he lay waiting for me, and that I was wearing peach-colored bikini panties and a low-cut bra. He pretended an enthusiasm for what would come next that I felt sure he didn’t feel. I did the same. I was embarrassed to be part of whatever game he was playing with the woman who loved him. And yet, in those days, sex was casual and often meaningless, simply because that’s what it meant to be a person of those times. I understand now that it was she, so distant, cool, cut off from me as a woman, I was trying somehow to reach. Much later I would wonder if my behavior annoyed or hurt her. If so, she never let on, but continued her firm, unequivocal advocacy of the rights of black people and of children, and later married a good man and raised a family. It was she whom I loved and admired, and wanted to be with. Not in a sexual way; at the time it was only men who set me sexually abuzz, but simply to talk, to ground, to move forward together as sisters. Because of my stupidity with this man who called you at odd hours to go to the cleaners and pick up his shirts, or to go to the corner and pick up cigarettes, I lost any chance of that possibility.
He was annoyed that you and I chose each other. Not because of anything he felt for me, but because you were an underling. A law student, yes, but also his servant, his gofer. Though you smiled, I could feel your humiliation, to be forced to do the trivial tasks Larry dreamed up for you: go to the pharmacy, the deli, the car wash. Make sure they don’t scratch the paint or get grease on the leather top.
After weeping our way through the ending of Madison County my friend said: “What this story proves is that love will find you.” And for us, that is what love did. And it had a sense of humor.
Because of the heat, ice cream was very big in Mississippi. We were always eating it. Do you remember? I came up the steep stairs to your air-conditioned offices—neatly renovated suites in an otherwise dilapidated building—wearing my littlest slipping and sliding dress, my slightest sandals, carrying a huge chocolate ice cream cone. You sat smiling at me from your desk beneath a window that framed your whole body in sunlight. Your hair was glowing. Your brown eyes filled with warmth. You loved, just loved, chocolate, you said. Especially ice cream. I offered the cone to you, after taking a huge lick. You accepted it happily and licked rapturously, as if it were the best ice cream you’d ever had. It was a highly erotic moment, an eroticism heightened by the fact that just by licking the same ice cream cone a huge portion of the Old South that had kept my soul and my free expression of eroticism chained was forced to fall. That was it, for me. The moment we bonded, the moment we fell in love. I felt the wonder, the oddness, the rightness, the sureness of it. My body, without moving from my side of the desk, seemed to lean into yours. And yours, though you kept your seat, met mine.
Everyone could see what had happened. It was as if we’d fallen into a separate space that contained just the two of us, even when we were apart. Larry thought up more and more errands for you to run, even coming to your apartment in the evening to tell you what they were, as if he forgot he had a phone. I listened to him instruct you from behind the closed door of your bedroom, thinking of the journey we made together to arrive there. Of riding out to the Ross Barnett Reservoir with you and Carolyn,* the blond secretary from your office, who clearly had designs on you, and who sat in the backseat with you and playfully put her foot in your lap. You and I were in one world, ours, she was in another. And when the police appeared, I was comforted to realize you and I remained in one world, the two of them in another. For of course the cop thought you and the white woman were a couple
, albeit a couple of troublemakers from out of state. I was just a young colored girl tagging along. Carolyn played into this, snuggling up to you and trying to impress both the policeman and me that she was the queen of our car. But you had not touched her foot. And now you did not return her cooing attentions. Your whole soul was wrapped around my feelings, as I sat with the ice-cold dread Southern cops always inspired, telling me without words to have no fear.
And that is what you would tell me for years to come. That you were there, with me. That your chosen role in life was to love and to protect me. That I was safe. It was music I had never heard.
The other evening I got to see the new civil rights lawyer everybody’s been talking about. They don’t talk about him just because he’s a civil rights lawyer. They talk about him because he’s got a black wife. And she’s pregnant.
I think maybe I’m one of the first people to know this. They keep to themselves a lot, and you hardly ever see her. But I was in Estelle’s Place; and way late, must have been around eleven o’clock, here come this cute white guy, with brown curly hair and a cute, courteous smile. And went right to the counter like he was a regular, and he ordered chitlins. Yes, he did.
And you know how black people are. Estelle acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, but when she came back to the back where my cousin Josie is one of the cooks, they all just fell out laughing. She said: He’s Jewish, you know. Like that explained everything. But it was funny enough to the rest of us without throwing that part in. I mean, how many white men do any of us see slamming into a chitlin joint in the middle of the night. He don’t eat them himself, of course, said Estelle. But his wife’s pregnant, and it’s chitlins that she has a craving for. And she nearly split her sides, laughing.