Black Deutschland (10 page)

I didn’t tell her about N. I. Rosen-Montag’s great plans for me. Cello had merely shrugged when I’d suggested they have the Rosen-Montags to dinner again. I guessed at the time that that meant she’d already tried and it hadn’t worked out. I was pleased that I had enjoyed the times when Cello had had to show an I’m-glad-for-you face when we met by her study door and I gave her the briefest of rundowns on how busy the builder of a city was keeping me.

I decided not to tell her about a conversation I’d had that afternoon with none other than Susan Sontag. I’d come across Sontag in Cello’s favorite record store in Europa Center, a large two-floor operation filled with classical music that Cello seldom bought. She agonized over new recordings, as though they were a kind of betrayal. I looked across the aisle and told Sontag that I’d heard her speak back in my hometown. She’d been a freshman at the University of Chicago when she was sixteen. I’d not expected a grin. She said she was glad she never became a teacher.

I told her I had moved to West Berlin for good and was never going home again. She told me home was where my books were. I told her that I had some books in Berlin, some were in my parents’ house, but most were in storage. There I was, in the fraternity of Americans Abroad, talking to this famous woman with the white streak in her hair. She said Twain called Berlin the German Chicago because it, too, was always in a state of becoming. She inclined her head and walked off when she sensed that other shoppers had realized she was approachable.

*   *   *

I didn’t just move away from Charlottenburg, from downtown West Berlin. I stopped watching TV, West German soap operas, American thrillers on the Armed Forces Network, and perplexing costume dramas on East German stations. I’d been kicked out, a laugh riot at the ChiChi, a rite of passage in becoming a true citizen of West Berlin. The mail didn’t come and Berlin was happy. A man with icy raindrops on his thick mustache was repairing the façade of the Hotel Kempinski. I smiled; he didn’t. That did not have to mean bad news.

I didn’t see Cello the night I left. Much earlier, across the courtyard, I could hear her calling her children into bed with her. Dram waited before he went back to the office, doing dictation on a portable machine. He shook hands with Manfred and grabbed a suitcase. Manfred manfully took two more of them. He didn’t humiliate me when Dram wished us good luck as though he thought we were together. Manfred said we might as well deal with the boxes of books. They left no room for me in the car. I followed in a taxi.

There I was in Schöneberg, on a futon on Manfred’s floor. It worked out because mostly he stayed over at his oncologist’s. He wasn’t drinking. I fingered his shirts in his absence but did nothing too creepy. The hot-water heater worked in the shower, but I wore a sweater and two pairs of socks under the duvet. I looked up over my boxes at the weak courtyard lamps trapped in the black of his wet, streaked window. A Liberty Bell, a gift from the people of the United States, slept in the tower of the city hall.

When he was around, he would yank my arms down toward the floor and stress how cool it was to have me staying with him. I was not in the way,
Mann
. To be pulled down like that meant that my head would bang against his shoulder, uncoordinated as I was. I listened to him close his book and turn off the light and cough. Though I was the goat in the stable that lets the stallion sleep, I couldn’t help it. I thought maybe I could rig my dreams. I tried to drift into sleep holding on to the image of us united and running the ChiChi.

FOUR

The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.

Cain was a fugitive, but as the son of Adam and Eve he was simply acting out the family tradition of exile. His wife, that roadside convenience, probably endured many a night of listening to Cain’s guilty tears and then many a morning of his loathing because she had witnessed his tears. Somehow he pulled himself together, and east of Eden, in the land of Nod, he founded a city, which he named for his son, Enoch.

Perhaps by the time Enoch grew up he was completely bored with his father’s neurotic, repetitive story of how harshly the Lord had used him. There, over the sputtering lamp and the darkening wine, was Cain, becoming morbidly self-pitying as he trotted out his old grievances and regrets. Perhaps Enoch and his mother exchanged a look, and one of them would say, My look at the time. We must to bed. And then they would abscond from the company of the anguished man.

I like to think that in this new city Cain found friends who welcomed his talk. Maybe some among them were true friends, but how could the founder of a city ever be sure people received him because they liked him. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Cain. An audience was an audience. Theoretically, the inhabitants of this city had to be his relations. If not, then they were phantoms, figments of Cain’s imagination. Hallucination was another family tradition. His parents believed in their conversations with a serpent.

*   *   *

The Chicago I grew up in was full of people who could not get away. They couldn’t cash checks; they couldn’t buy tickets out of town. State Street was Stuck Street. People without gas money went to work on State Street. They ate government cheese for lunch. The Dan Ryan Expressway slammed through property that had slipped from family hands before the Great Depression.

Liquor stores, beauty shops, check-cashing joints, gas stations, and tambourine Pentecostal churches in former drugstores made it impossible for me to understand what had been so fabled about Bronzeville. There were a couple of corners, but most everything was boarded up. My dad couldn’t get over the loss of the Regal, his favorite theater, the place with the balcony where he became a man, and Mom said she was tired of debating whether the Taylor projects could ever be cleaned up.

The South Side had been the scene of bitter anti-urban renewal meetings. The people, as represented by Mom, lost. She minded the high-rises we couldn’t see, those finished in the late sixties, so much so that she wouldn’t drive downtown with us to look at the Marina Towers or the Hancock building as they went up, the kind of Sunday excursions Dad liked to propose, almost as a joke. He liked to drive under the post office.

While he read the
Hyde Park Herald
, Mom sat defiantly with
Voices
. She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after I learned who I. M. Pei was.

Root Square, as my mother succeeded in having East Ogden Square renamed, hidden by maples and elms, was a small, old pocket not far from Mom’s friends. My earliest humiliations at bat took place around the corner in Nicholas Park. Everywhere you met the smiling unreality of the neo-Gothic university. Mom said Dad wanted us to live where we could safely walk to school and come home for lunch.

We never took public transportation when I was growing up. After we left home, my brother, Solomon, and I had to hurt Dad’s and Mom’s feelings to make them stop taking us to the airport and picking us up from the airport. In the end, Solomon wouldn’t give them the details of his flights, which sent Mom up the wall because her days were nothing if not schedules. She suffered, wondering what had happened to me, until she heard the trunk of the taxi. Solomon clearly believed I owed him on this one and I went along with him and wouldn’t let Dad drive me. Solomon rented a car when he landed. He and I seldom visited at the same time.

Our house always looked as though it were playing dumb. The front garden died under the steps up to the front door and after a lifetime of costly and impractical schemes for it from one of Mom’s crazies after another, Dad declared it his territory and instituted no-nonsense, low-maintenance conifers, evergreen bushes and hedges that shielded the house. It was so unassuming it could have been a movie set held up by a giant T square in the back. But the narrow limestone façade hid what a warren it was. A couple of Mom’s crazies were usually lining up their shoes compulsively on the third floor. Mom gave shelter only to women, not that some of them weren’t as scary as any man. Cello was often ensconced on the third floor, too, in the room in the front, the sacred presence, the personification, however unwilling, of racial uplift through art.

My brother and I and Cello’s siblings had the second floor, each to his or her own cell. My brother and I were never bunk-bed pals. We had our own rooms. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was also on the second floor, but maybe because there was only one bathroom per floor, they spent a lot of their time in their basement domain, in his den, her office, and the back room where Dad worked on his planes and Mom painted placards. The closets everywhere were packed with boxes of labeled rocks or the minutes of forgotten social betterment ventures or 78-rpm records. Mom had the carpet removed on what she from time to time called the parlor floor. She put her beloved piano on sheets of acoustic-boosting tiles. We’d been there as long as anyone.

The flat-roofed, three-story houses of tiny Root Square wanted to scoot over some blocks and huddle under the El to get out of the rain. Once, I saw Dad look around when he was putting Cello’s father in the car and I could tell that in his head he was urging the old-timers to hold on. Two white “yuppie” couples, as the white Sunday supplements called them, had gone around the square trying to interest people in a new homeowners’ association. Mom suspected that they were checking to see who was their sort of black person, the kind that would fit in to the gatherings they were planning.

As a child, I knew that my parents were kind of laughed at, but people respected them. Mom was built like a fire hydrant and though Dad was tall, his caboose was enormous. Dad was wild about sports, but neither he nor Mom was athletic. They walked like two bears in love. They couldn’t dance. Neither wore clothes well. Everything Dad had was dark gray and Mom stayed in dark green from season to season. They both had short hair, in order not to have to do much to it and, in Mom’s case, in order not to be accused of having “good hair.” Dad’s name was on the roster of a few black clubs, but that was because loyal friends had insisted. Once a Kappa, always a Kappa. Some remembered the
Eagle
in its better days. Mom wasn’t in any black women’s club and the Quakerism of her college pacifism meant that her committees in later years were mostly white.

Dad was an only child. His father died when he was young, of a heart attack on the train where he worked as a porter. My grandmother was a schoolteacher who ended up making paintings of photographs she liked in
National Geographic
. I remembered her on the third floor for a while. Then I hated going to see her in the nursing home. Her canvases were strung up around the back porch like the flags of all nations. Because Mom’s father’s family hated her mother, Mom grew up as an only child. I once accused Mom and Dad of having me just so Solomon wouldn’t be an only child.

I didn’t always feel that I belonged to the three of them, the walnut sitting with almonds. Because I was darker than my brother and my parents, to my way of thinking, had I been able to put shame into words back then, they had an expectation of acceptance I was denied. They would always look like decent people, the right sort of black people, whereas I had to talk for a few minutes before white people decided not to throw me out of wherever I was. Cello wasn’t light-skinned either, but she’d been a prodigy all her life. Her soft yet regal manner opened every door.

Mom wrung her hands when she saw me. I knew I looked terrible, a walking, sebaceous coffee bean. Cello had not reported me, but Mom and Dad knew I had moved out before I left Berlin. Mom concluded that Cello and I had had a disagreement of some kind, but she wasn’t going to push me about it. This would not have been the first time something had blown up between us. I’d been there awhile, as Dram said, and that was enough of an explanation. That Cello had kept quiet about the cocaine put me back in the sleuth mood, but there was nothing I could do about it. Mom studied me enough as it was. They used to be so close, Mom and Cello.

Dad had his own sheen on. Climactic tournaments in the sports he followed were only weeks away. Every year he parked Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., in a chair in front of the TV and kept up a running commentary on the games. Sometimes Solomon was in town and Dad had someone who answered and argued. Plus, I could tell as soon as I stepped inside the house: there were no crazies in residence. Dad was a different man when he’d had Mom to himself for a spell. He was outgoing and funny and put syrup smiles on the pancakes he should not have been eating.

*   *   *

In 1934, the Shay brothers, Ralston and Reginald, founded
The American Eagle
, and for a while there, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was a serious competitor in the weekly black newspaper market. It had an opera column, record reviews, poetry reviews, a very popular medical advice bureau, and a religion reporter who had an inadvertently entertaining way with the latest Baptist scandals. Its pages were open to a number of local cartoonists. The real star was Uncle Ralston himself, my mother’s uncle, who doubled as the sports reporter.

It had not been as easy to get back to the Alabama State Normal School as they had thought. Why the Shay brothers could never go back, they didn’t want anyone to find out, Cello’s grandfather liked to say. But that was a bit of make-believe, tough-dude publicity. My dad said that the Shay brothers worked one summer at a resort hotel in Wisconsin in order to earn their school fees, but they lost all their money to hustlers in Chicago. Their father told them not to come back to Alabama and they didn’t.