American Histories - John Edgar Wideman

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room for him only if he stayed in them alone.

      I could have let myself be satisfied with seeing Gene, convinced myself I was saying goodbye to a stranger in Atlanta, but it was him, his neat, pencil-thin mustache, elegant features, my brother’s unbegrudging silence in the open casket.

      MUSIC

      I find my sister in the big, soft chair where I’d usually find Charles. Television playing with no sound. She is asleep until I pat her shoulder and her eyelids flutter. Leaning down closer to her ear I say, “Time for bed, miss.”

      She’s dressed for bed. Probably had been upstairs to bed at least once before she wound up in the chair in front of a muted TV in the living room at three in the morning where I had wandered after bed and sleep failed me, too.

      As I had tipped down the dark stairs, blinks of light from the living room did not help much, and my hand used the wooden banister on the stairwell’s open side to guide me, to remind me that a rail laid atop the steps ran down along the opposite wall, a steel track for an incline that carried a chair up and down, a rail that could trip you up and break your neck if you weren’t careful.

      “Dreamed of my girl,” my sister, eyes shut again, halfway whispers as if worried speaking too loud might disturb somebody’s sleep. Her own. Her dream.

      Dreaming of a daughter who had died only a few months before this visit, whose long illness had confined her to a wheel-chair that required the motorized lift I’d just been avoiding. This is what I think first when I hear my sister’s words, but something soft in her voice had opened to let me enter, and I understand the girl she dreamed of was two girls, my grown-up niece whose untouched room I’m not yet prepared to enter alone, and the baby, not quite two, lost how many, many years ago, and as usual when I recall the one who never grew up, always strangely older and younger than her sister, a song starts to play, silently as pictures moving across the screen until I turn off the TV. That old Spinners song we had danced to in this same room, dark then, too. My niece tiny, fever sweaty, swaddled in a nightgown, me cradling her in my arms, blowing on her brow to cool it with my breath as we swayed, near to sleep like my sister in the chair who bestirs herself, reaches back to plant her palms on the armrests, scrunches her weight forward to get it balanced on her feet to stand. To smile, to go up to bed.

      BONDS

      She struggles to keep him inside her. Not because she knows that in less than six months Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor and this country, flags flying, will join in the slaughter of world war and that child after child, all colors, sizes, shapes, religions, nationalities, including babies like the one she’s expecting, will be gathered up and starved, tortured, incinerated.

      Struggles to keep her baby inside not because she understood the horror of war, understood that once it starts the horror never ends, young men put in uniforms and marched off to save the country or die trying, some of those soldiers young men from her colored neighborhood, two she will never meet except as names on a memorial plaque beside the door of Homewood’s Carnegie public library, where her brother Otis, who made it back from war, used to take her by the hand to borrow books, then years later took her son, men returning she will encounter in the street or in movies or on TV, some full of love for any girl or boy inside her, men who gladly would risk their lives to protect her or her children playing in the streets, but others rotten with war’s hate, men with weapons the government issues and teaches them to shoot, men who would kill, no regrets, any children she’d bear.

      She struggles to keep the baby inside not because she feared terrible pain once she starts to squeeze him out. Pain scalding her they say worse than the hot comb when her mother digs too deep. Told you stop your fidgeting, girl. Holler and jump you make me burn you again. She’d never disbelieved the women’s stories about how godawful the pain. Harder to believe what they said about how suddenly easy it is afterwards, after all the suffering, your insides tearing apart inch by inch, then out comes the baby and it’s a sweet, warm bundle on your chest and you won’t remember why all the screams and carrying-on. Won’t remember you’d been thinking just minutes before you’d rather die than burn one second more.

      She keeps him inside not because she knew the baby a he, not because she knew she’d be closer to the end of her life once his life begins. Not because she knew his eyes the last eyes to see her alive. Him silent on a hospital chair beside her hospital bed, book in his hands, monitor beep-beep-beeping, his eyes on a page the precise instant she’s no more, missing her last breath.

      She’s determined to keep the baby inside longer not because longer might change the baby’s color or keep money always in her child’s pocket. Longer inside not because of things she knows or should or could or might not want to know. She holds him inside because she’s sure the day is Friday, June thirteen, and sure the child she carries already has two strikes against it—strike of poor, strike of colored—and no way she’s going to let a third strike— bad luck of being born on Friday the thirteenth—doom every day of her first child’s life on earth before it even gets here.

      She will struggle till midnight. Then four or five minutes past midnight, she decides. For good measure. To be absolutely certain. Four or five minutes more of agony, bearable or not bearable.

      Then okay . . . okay now, she will say to herself, no strength left to speak the words aloud. No one in the room but her anyway, so she thinks okay. Rolls her eyeballs up to the wall clock to be sure, an effort that almost kills her, and then okay now, she says. Lets go of all that scorching air hoarded inside her gut. Only a tiny hole for it to pass through. She gasps, hollers. Sighs and gulps. A dull pop then a pop-popping push, rush, and shit . . . oh, shit. Please, not shit. Let it be air, a fart, no, many rumbling humongous farts. And oh my, oh my, my she’s spewing water, blood, beans, those baked beans doctor and mother both had warned her not to eat. Beans, a baby, a nasty mess dirtying the bed, cleaning out her insides. A small voice in her head mutters feeble apologies, but she knows she’s smiling. Stinky. Wet. Warm. Not alone.

      She struggled to hold him inside a little longer she tells him one day because on that miserable night of June 13, and with two strikes against him she had no power to change, she told herself to stop shuddering, squirming, moaning, and groaning. Wrapped herself in bonds of steel. Steel around thighs, knees. Steel tying her ankle bones together so no part of him leaks or peeks or sneaks out and gets struck by a bolt of Friday the Thirteenth’s evil lightning.

      * * *

      She struggled to keep the baby inside not because she feared losing her first one. Not because she feared it might be her last. Not because she understood what would happen or not happen to the boy or girl. She held on because six minutes of June 14, 1941, needed to pass before she’d let go, and now more than three-quarters of a century has passed, many, many June fourteens, and each one his birthday, him alive and breathing and her, too, he tells her, and won’t let go.

      NEW START

      We were in bed watching TV. My beautiful, scared wife and scared, colored me. Watching had become our nightly habit since treatments began that might save my life if they didn’t kill me. We’d pick a series recommended by somebody we liked, with, ideally, lots of seasons already under its belt, so depending on mood, degree of exhaustion, length and quality of episodes, we could choose to watch one, two, sometimes, rarely, three before sleep. Or watch, as was often the case, before a night of broken sleep. Restless, anxious. Waiting for morning. One day less in the countdown to my final treatment. One night less. Us closer to the next night we could start to watch again.

      In one of Downton Abbey’s cavernous rooms, large enough to hold the entire house I grew up in, a room whose art and furnishings worth more money than you’d need to pay off all mortgages on every dwelling in the block of real estate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where my family had lived, the Abbey’s owners and present residents sit and stand, posed elegantly, drinks in hand or close enough at hand to reach easily or to be handed to them by an efficient servant. A cast of meticulously dressed and groomed

      British aristocrats exhausted, a

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