American Histories - John Edgar Wideman

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my peoples is, but I’d overhear this or that in somebody’s story and so in a manner of speaking I kept up, knew you still alive, then your mama dead and you married living on Pierce Road in Detroit, three grandkids I ain’t never laid eyes on, never will now . . . Excuse me, Miss, you got that all down so far or maybe I should slow up or maybe just go ahead and shut up now, stop now cause how you think this letter find him anyway even if I say it right and you catch every word I say on paper it still don’t sound right to me hearing myself talk this story, it just makes me sad, and it’s a damned shame, a mess anyway, too late to tell my son my daddy, his granddaddy, Jim Daniels, give me John Brown’s name because John Brown carried us out from slavery in the fall of 1858, my brother and sister, mama, and Jim Daniels, my father cross seven states, 1,100 miles, eighty-two days in wagons, railroad trains, on foot, boats, along with six other Negroes John Brown stole from slavery in Kansas and Missouri and Daddy say one them other six, a woman slave, ask John Brown, “How many miles, how many days, Captain Brown, we got to go before freedom?” and John Brown answer her and the lady slave say back, “That’s a mighty far piece you say, Captain, sir. Ole Massa pitch him a terrible conniption fit we ain’t back to fix his dinner,” and then me born on one them last couple days before they cross the river to freedom, so my daddy Jim Daniels named me John Brown, he told me, and if I’da been more than half a man when you and your mama come up there I woulda took care of youall and passed my name on to you and you be another John Brown whatever else my sweet Ella called you you’d be John Brown, too, and if you knew the story of the name, son, maybe you would have passed the name on, too, John Brown, and maybe not, Miss, what do you think, Miss, is it too late, too much time gone by, Miss, what do you think.

      10

      Along an edge of the Gulf of Morbihan I walk through woods, on gravelly, rocky beaches, in sand, on a narrow walkway atop a mile-long stone seawall, then climb a bluff overlooking the wall where I can peer way, way out to dark clumps of island in the gulf’s glittering water, towards open sea invisible beyond the islands. I imagine an actor assigned to deliver the colored John Brown monologue in a film version of “JB & FD.” The actor asks me why I choose to make the nice lady in the script white, not colored. Asks why I invented a colored John Brown.

      Powerful sea winds have shaped trees I stand next to on the bluff, winds that would shape me, too, no doubt, if I stood here very long. Trees with thick, ancient-looking gray trunks, bark deeply furrowed as old John Brown’s skin, multiple trunks entwined, branches big as trunks, twisted, tortured, though a few trees shoot more or less straight up to vast crowns that form a layered green canopy of feathery needles high overhead. A row of maybe seven, eight survivors of probably hundreds of years of battering wind, and spaced among them another four or five cut down to stumps a couple yards across you could sit on and stare out at endless water beyond the edge of land, beyond the seawall and Roman ruins below.

      Next to trees, still standing and fallen, I forget who I am, who I’m supposed to be, and it is perfection. Doesn’t matter who I am or believed I was or all the shitty jobs performed to get to France—I listen for the voices of Frederick Douglass and John Brown sealed within the silence of those huge trees. Trees I don’t know a name for, thinking maybe pine or fir or conifer, and I never will need to look up the name because for a small instant I’m inside them, and it lasts forever.

      DARK MATTER

      We go out to dinner and discuss eating.

      We go out to dinner and discuss the economy’s downswings and upswings.

      We go out to dinner and discuss the importance of staying physically fit and the difficulties in busy, aging lives of maintaining a consistent, healthy program of exercise.

      We go out to dinner and discuss Vladimir Putin’s rumored kleptomania, how the U.S. State Department allegedly advises a famous coach who just returned from conducting basketball clinics in Russia that maybe the best course of action would be not to lodge a complaint with the UN about his NBA championship ring which had gone missing under extremely suspicious circumstances, while the coach was a guest at Putin’s dacha, but to live and let live and they, the U.S. Government, would ante up for a replacement ring.

      We go out to dinner and discuss choices after a waitress—long legs, minidress, coffee-au-lait-colored skin, intricately cornrowed hair—squatted in the darkness at the end of our table, peering over its edge as she articulated in her oddly precise diction subtleties we could anticipate, surprises far beyond anything words on the menu able to express. Wonderfully enticing items, she convinced us, not because we believed she’d peeked at the chef preparing them but because she was a tasty appetizer we were already sampling down there between our table and the next row of tables, her pretty legs folded under her, big eyes, pretty face popping up Kilroy-like where we had no reason to expect a face to be.

      We go out to dinner and discuss public schools supposed to educate thirteen-year-old colored boys, public schools that taught them nothing, or schools anyway that did not teach them not to shoot each other inside school buses. Public schools where white cops learned it was okay to shoot down unarmed thirteen-year-old colored boys in the streets.

      We go out to dinner and discuss growing up, the love-hate of family relationships, parents and parenting and learning to forgive mistakes, our parents’ mistakes, our children’s, our own, and why should anybody believe things might ever be different, people being people as far back in time as people remember, same ole, same ole selfishness, rivalries, cruelties unto death. A couple mornings after that night, I rode down in the elevator with my bagful of glass, plastic, cans, and miscellaneous other recyclables our building asks residents to sort out and deposit in slots in various colored containers in the basement, and on the way back up accidentally stopped one floor short of mine and risked knocking on 801’s door, though it was Sunday and barely 10:00 a.m., but thank goodness, L responded almost immediately, almost as if she’d been awaiting my knock, and that sort of relieved the pressure, because it meant I was not necessarily disturbing a neighbor’s sleep or privacy or worse. Without exchanging a single word with me, L went to fetch her husband, and suddenly there he was, beside her just outside the door, him puffy-faced, spiky hair askew, wearing a Peanuts pj top and sweatpants, me in cutoffs, T-shirt, standing in the hall, fresh from trash dumping, wondering why I’d knocked. Then L with a stoic smile moved a few steps backward into the apartment so we—two upper-middle-class, differently colored, orphaned males—could hug. As we separated, nothing to say. He knows I must know his father gone now like mine. Dead in Dublin from a stroke suffered the same night we had been out to dinner in a restaurant and he had discussed his father’s loneliness since losing his wife of fifty years, his father’s helplessness, speechlessness palpable while they spoke on the phone.

      We go out to dinner and discuss relativity, dark matter, climate change, the origins and inevitable demise of the life-form we represented, our guilt collectively or individually, yea or nay, for circumstances in which we find ourselves.

      We go out to dinner and discuss Breaking Bad, the nationwide epidemic of crystal meth, rural versus urban poverty, the former attorney general’s height, the INS, IRS, ISIS, bedbug-sniffing dogs.

      We go out to dinner and discuss those missing.

      We go out to dinner and discuss us, the ones present who weren’t so bad off, after all, if we looked at the options.

      * * *

      We go out to dinner and discuss retirement and my old buddy sitting across the table from me laughs loudly at himself laughing at me, grad students in Spain where some Spaniards called me El Moro, and one called me a big Chinaman, me laughing and splashing around once in a puddle of my vomit several feet deep according to my old buddy. His vomit, too, he boasted, him laughing and splashing in it, too, and why in the world, what in the world, what got into us, man, back in the day, what were we thinking, man, all that booze, booze, booze like no tomorrow.

      We go out to dinner and discuss the Twin Towers, and they trundle through the restaurant door in blackface, huffing and puffing past a crowd of multicolored patrons to pull up chairs and sit at our table, cute lobster bibs tied round their necks, smoking cigars in a clearly marked no-smoking zone, two good ole boys just happy to be out and chilling

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