Black Deutschland (11 page)

The
Eagle
appealed to obsessives among Chicago’s black residents, and given how crowded and rough that big place was, there were thousands of people who found something in the paper they could lose themselves in. Uncle Ralston analyzed first basemen and heavyweights, black and white, with such contrariness that he incited readers in Chicago and in other cities where the
Eagle
was distributed to send denunciations, which he printed unedited—except for obscenities—under the title “Letters to the Dunderhead.” He made a bad call early on as to Jackie Robinson’s potential.

The
Eagle
reprinted odd facts from old almanacs: “Did you know that in 1910…” Its news stories were mere notices compared with its features. But then the
Eagle
treated Bible sales meetings and barbers’ conventions as news stories. Because it was not a daily, it did not waste more time than necessary on the weighty questions of the moment. People searched its columns for mention of themselves. The paper was full of names, lists, memberships, reunions, prayers for the sick and the shut-in, who had gone to which bridge tournament, who had been licensed by which state authority, and what benevolent lodge had met where.

Uncle Ralston liked to say that they starved for the first ten years at ten cents a copy and then the war saved them. But they had made it to safety before then, when they got their own Goss press and the newspaper could come flying off the rack folded and cut. The investment was his wife’s. Her family’s insurance company had begun in the murky areas I read about in Urban Studies classes, among slick blacks who, for worthless stock in burial societies, took nickels from Southern blacks come North for jobs. The
Eagle
had white visitors during World War II because the army noticed that the paper printed letters about the treatment of black soldiers in Southern states where their training camps were located, most of the letters from members of the soldiers’ families.

The bullying by the army did little to enhance Uncle Ralston’s reputation after the war. He had some profile in the National Negro Chamber of Commerce. He was a Republican, officially, convinced that his support was important to Congressman De Priest, and the
Eagle
had ignored the New Deal in its pages while loving the post office as management training ground for Negroes. Uncle Ralston sometimes blamed his refusal to sell war bonds as the reason he could never get on the boards of the Wabash Avenue YMCA or Provident Hospital. He’d rejected membership in the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association at first, but he joined up after the war, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was interested in everybody and he needed cover.

He had a business on the South Side, but he was not popular, his position among blacks not secure. He said the snobs in the Forty Club looked down on him because he came from Alabama. He was jealous of the black leaders on Truman’s commission to desegregate the military, Mom said, as if anyone would have called on him for such a thing. Uncle Ralston did not become a Democrat until Rockefeller lost his party to Goldwater’s crazies. There were stories about his wife’s family that Mom liked to tell, about their having been in the policy or numbers game as much as the insurance business. She said that Uncle Ralston met Cello’s grandmother when the Shay brothers worked as bookies for Cello’s grandmother’s father.

“Keep the Panthers out of our schools,” Uncle Ralston said, looking at Mom. He told her she was a hypocrite for joining the National Housing Conference. “What’s wrong with your house?”

My mother was Betty Shay, Reginald’s daughter, and she married my father, Alfred Goodfinch, the newspaper’s young treasurer. Ralston Jr., vice president, was his best friend, mostly because everyone said so. They spent a lot of time together in the office, each in his world, not talking much. Ralston Jr. was the black nationalist casualty in the family, showing up everywhere with secondhand bean pies and pamphlets. Dad kept his distance from the struggle, though he was no self-hating black guy or fastidious conservative who somehow wanted to limit his exposure to other black people. He was on the side of historical justice, he just had no appetite for confrontation, whether it be on the streets or in the committee room.

It was 1966 when the Pennsylvania Railroad failed and Uncle Ralston went to Ghana to fetch Ralston Jr., Cello’s father. He must have realized on the plane back just how whacked his son was. It was his third big mental episode in two years. Ralston Jr. was going to miss out. He’d gone off the deep end and was going to miss out on the enormous changes heralded by the Great Society. Uncle Ralston believed in Lyndon Baines Johnson as a white man who had seen the light. But his son had fallen out with his own reason just when it was his turn to be lifted up by federal programs and low-interest business loans and the Negro vote.

The
Eagle
froze, culturally, that summer Uncle Ralston went to Africa for the first and last time. He resisted change in any part of the newspaper thereafter. By 1968 the news stories and columns said first, “Afro-American,” then superhistorical “Aframerican,” and finally “black,” in spite of Uncle Ralston’s objections. For a year, he’d refused to give his permission to switch to something more in accord with the times. Then they just went ahead without his permission.

Bit by bit, the managing editor dared to go over the publisher’s weary head. Dad, acting vice president, went upstairs to the office in the two-story tower on the right to inform Uncle Ralston of what had already been done. If a thing had been decided for business purposes, then Uncle Ralston could accept it. After all, he’d lived through some dicey times that required him to eat compromise every day, he pointed out. Dad therefore presented change as business, as something about which the paper had no choice. But what was wrong with the
Eagle
had been a problem for some time. The old crew was either dead or retired and they couldn’t be replaced for what the
Eagle
could pay.

There were mutterings outside, in the community, wherever that was, that Uncle Ralston was an Uncle Tom, a relic of bygone ward politics. He wasn’t. He was as much of a race man as my withdrawn, private dad. But he sat out the militant years not because he didn’t understand the anger, but because the revolution had taken his son, so he believed. One day his suave heir had tailor’s bills and met white politicians at the Palmer House, and the next he was in denim overalls, flying to Ghana in search of his pre-industrial-age, natural soul.

The women were the grunts of the revolution, the ones who didn’t miss the meetings, who put away the chairs and made the calls and bought the coffee and kept the minutes. Mom was a self-declared enemy of the Blues. “Everything is allowed, because I’m feeling bad.” She wasn’t a big fan of Gospel either. We seldom went to church anyway. Mom would show up at different churches and colleges for Handel at Christmas and Bach at Easter. She said she worked with so many pastors during the week that she needed rest from them on the weekend. But she liked priests, the guitar-playing sort. No tunes of the counterrevolution there.

Mom’s mother had come up from Georgia and picketed Woolworth’s in 1930. She got pregnant and didn’t go back to Atlanta to teach music. Mom’s parents got married once her father’s divorce became final, but her cousins back in their teaching positions at Morris Brown College had always been a little “funny” about her, Mom said, and they were not close. Her father’s family, the Shays, particularly Cello’s grandmother, gave her the feeling of being picked up with a pair of tongs.

Mom’s father’s children by his first wife blamed his decline into drink on her mother. They would never have anything to do with my mother. They went out of their way to be rude to her at his grave. The minister asked the widows to compose themselves in the presence of death. Mom’s mother, Lucille, bridge player and comrade to white leftists, wore white gloves, yet she was the brawling kind. There was no estate to fight over. Reginald’s bankruptcy hadn’t even been a drama. It was just a legal declaration of what had been so for a long time.

Lucille—Champ, her friends called her—rotund, puffing, carried the odd survival supply in her purse, like a flashlight or a thermal blanket that could fold down into the size of a deck of cards. “What I have to have is a heel. I never leave the house under five feet six.” Her wig looked like a helmet of steel wool, something that could cut. Mom seldom saw her; we never experienced her as a grandmother. I was fat, but Champ couldn’t keep her eyes off my brother. Some Laboratory High School girls stopped bickering over Solomon when our grandmother showed them the .22 she’d brought along to his graduation.

She started ringing doorbells in her huge building at upsetting hours, showing neighbors her .22 and letting them know she had their backs. When Mom decided that her mother couldn’t live alone anymore, she had to drug her to trick her into the nursing home. Mom asked Dad to remove the illegal handguns under the kitchen sink and in Champ’s night table. Solomon said her place smelled like a human barnyard. There were dead mice in the oven. She had gone downhill right along with the famed Rosenwald Apartments where Mom grew up.

Mom kept a picture of her mother outside the Grand Terrace Ballroom on VE Day. She believed in music in the schools. Mom said her mother had been proud of knowing the legendary teacher and violinist at the DuSable School, Captain Diet. Through him, Mom had had first-rate music teachers. Champ gave Mom that.

*   *   *

“I always thought ‘Negro’ very distinguished,” Dad said. Solomon got up from the table. “Negro Spiritual, Negro historian.”

“Ne-gro, Ne-gro,” Cello’s little brother Ronald and sister Rhonda chanted.

“‘I am a black woman the music of my song some sweet arpeggio of tears is written in a minor key,’” Mom recited.

“‘And I can be heard humming it in the middle of the night,’” Cello continued from nearby. She had been going to a hairdresser Mom disapproved of, someone who worked from a chair in her apartment bathroom. She’d styled Cello’s unbelievable hair into balls and loops tied up in heavy gold thread. She looked like she was wearing a queen bee’s egg sac.

It was perfectly okay to stare at Cello when she came back from her unauthorized hairdresser. Mom was hoping to pressure her into returning to the fold, the shop that was also a policy parlor, not far from the
Eagle
, where she’d been going for years. Otherwise, we were forbidden to manifest our giddy responses to Cello’s experiments with her looks. That would add to her self-consciousness about her new life as a beautiful young slimmed-down pianist who’d impressed a jury with her playing of the
Appassionata
. Cello’s new, maybe still shaky confidence showed up in how many of Mom’s rules and Dad’s maxims she didn’t want to follow or believe anymore.

“And I can be heard humming in the night,” Mom said.

“What?”

“The poem. Mari Evans. The line is, ‘And I can be heard humming in the night.’ And don’t say ‘what.’ Darling?”

Both Cello and Dad answered.

“And since when did you stop being my brown baby?” Dad said behind Mom’s chair. In those days, he went back to the
Eagle
after dinner.

I was enamored of Cello and spied on her a great deal when I was a boy and she a teenager. I knew absolutely that she used to crack the door to the basement and stick her hair in, even if I didn’t understand what it was that she was trying to catch the sound of.

*   *   *

Nobody could kick me out of Berlin, I told myself. I had not flunked out. No construction went on in the winter months, I told the ChiChi. Incredibly, Rosen-Montag was attending to two projects in Japan. I was just taking a break. I had to. Rosen-Montag’s wife informed me that I would no longer receive wads of West German marks every four weeks. Instead, I would be paid from chapter to chapter, invoice to invoice—meaning, irregularly. I never asked about the faces no longer around the Nissen huts. Anyone not involved in site construction or Rosen-Montag’s next projects was expendable, the canteen gossip said. My German had improved. Stray bits of information seeped into my understanding unbidden.

To celebrate my departure, Manfred himself prepared an onion tart. His blue-eyed oncologist brought a horrible, giant cookie of the season. I got to sleep, but a part of me must have been listening for it. She tried to keep it down when Manfred brought her to orgasm in the middle of the night. I could hear his balls slapping her ecstatic behind.

My campaign for an adult life was not over. I had merely withdrawn to winter quarters. Some mornings it was so cold in Chicago the pavement burned the soles of my feet even in my Doc Martens. Mom and Dad had so much stuff in the garage the car wouldn’t fit. I went out in the mornings to scrape the ice from Dad’s windshield. I wanted him to see how together I was, mundane things included. My Berlin books were in those boxes under Manfred’s front-room window, I liked telling myself. The rest were back with me, in my room in my father’s house, because I could no longer afford the storage bill across town.

I was working for the process server of a lawyer friend of Dad’s while revising chapters that Rosen-Montag’s wife had decided were not headed in the right direction. The editorial committee of Rosen-Montag’s foundation recommended that more emphasis be put on getting his points across through his illustrations. I was stunned to hear from such a body. My chapters were in danger of being reduced to captions unless I could come up with something.

Dad had an office at home, in his basement den, and another at the Cracker Jack plant, an accountancy side job, and his main one in the
Eagle
building and printing plant off Wabash, near Forty-Third, in its own dead-end pocket of parking lot. One of the former dairies in the neighborhood, the
Eagle
building was sometimes mistaken for a hamburger joint because of its bright Art Deco front of white purple-bordered tiles, with two-story towers at either end. Only the front of the plant was decorated. The rest stretched toward a far alley, a wide, flat one-story structure of industrial brown and unreconstructed factory windows.