Brother West (5 page)
As a child, I didn’t have the benefit of Professor Nozick’s wisdom; the death shudder would not leave me alone. In years to come, it would manifest itself differently. I’d later learn that certain figures with whom I felt deep rapport—Martin Luther King, Jr. among them—had also entertained the notion of nonexistence. As I said, the shudder came early to me—perhaps as early as age six—but to call it total fear would be a misrepresentation. Yes, dread and terror were involved, but also perplexity. Exploration. Where does nonexistence take you? What does it mean to be stripped of your own consciousness? How do we live with the idea that we are always tantalizingly close to death? At any moment the bridge can collapse.
On the other side of the bridge, and perhaps on the other side of the death shudder, was another symbol. This symbol had a name—Delores. Delores lived in the first house when you crossed over. She lived with her mother and, to my eyes, Delores was the most beautiful girl in the world. She had black hair and brown eyes, and when I listened to Curtis Mayfield and his Impressions singing “Gypsy Woman,” I knew he was talking about Delores:
From nowhere through a caravan around the campfire light
A lovely woman in motion with hair as dark as night
Her eyes were like that of a cat in the dark
That hypnotized me with love
She was a gypsy woman
As a kid, I didn’t even know what a gypsy was, but whatever she was, Delores fit the bill. I was drawn to her mystery. I was attracted to her shyness. She seemed unknowable, and yet I was moved to know her. Then why couldn’t I muster the courage to say anything to her? Lord knows I was an aggressive dancer. I pursued puppy love all the time. But Delores, who lived just on the other side of the bridge— which is to say, on the other side of death—was deeply different.
Delores existed as a young girl, but she was also an idea. She stopped the shudder. She stopped my heart. She took my breath away. She seemed to say,
In this world where death is always imminent, always threatening, always frighteningly possible, I can make you happy with a simple smile.
Then there was Eliot’s smile.
Eliot Hutchinson was a schoolmate, a beautiful brother with a sunshine disposition. Easy-going brother, help-you-out brother, fun-to-be-with brother. Eliot wasn’t a gangster and Eliot wasn’t a bully. Eliot was cool people. Eliot got along with everyone, growing up with all of us, dancing, playing sports, joking, doing his homework, and living his life. Then tragedy struck. Eliot got a brain tumor and, just like that, cancer consumed him. Eliot died.
I’ll never forget Eliot’s funeral. The level of grief was extraordinary. The pain on his parents’ faces is something that still lives with me. The wailing, the crying out to God, the casket in the ground. Death came home to Glen Elder. Death took Eliot. And I couldn’t help but wonder—
Why not me
?
Who gets to live and who gets to die?
I had no answers. Wasn’t enough to say,
God is in charge and we can’t understand or question God
. Jesus was real and Jesus was love, but why couldn’t Jesus’s love have kept Eliot alive? The fact that my friend fell without warning or reason haunted me. Eliot’s death seemed so absurd it created a surd—a gaping hole—in my understanding of life. It excited a certain panic in my way of thinking and feeling. It sucked all the meaning and rich sublimity out of being alive. It had me fixated on this dead-end notion of nonexistence. For the first time, I understood that most common of expressions—
I’m scared to death
.
Yet I cannot characterize myself as a frightened child. As fascinated as I was by death, I was still deeply in love with life as it was lived in the black neighborhoods of Sacramento, California in the fifth and sixth decades of the twentieth century. I was deeply in love with life because I was deeply in love with music and girls and sports. I can’t overemphasize the role of sports. Because both Dad and Cliff were superb athletes, I was inclined to excel as well. I had no compunctions or conflicts about running out on the baseball diamond, putting on a glove, and fielding those hot grounders to second base until I absolutely perfected my double-play move. In fact, my father, along with our neighbors—other black men involved in their sons’ lives—built those diamonds with their own hands and organized our leagues themselves.
But how did the fiery passion for competitive sport and its breakneck energy coexist within the soul of a boy preoccupied with questions of mortality?
T
HE IMAGES COME AT ME
like curve balls. They do not arrive straight over the plate. They twist, they drop, they change direction. They hop, skip, and jump all over the place …
I’m running. I’m born to run. I’m following in my brother’s footsteps—I’ll never catch Cliff or match his achievements—but I’m running nonetheless. Coach says I have talent in the two-mile and I’m starting to win meets here and there. The schedule is crazy. Dad gets us up and we run five miles.
Earlier in my life, I was running back home, grabbing my bike and heading out to throw my paper route. I threw the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
Sacramento Union,
and the
Sacramento Bee
. I was bicycling like a madman ’cause the dogs were waiting for me. Man, the dogs were mean. The Rottweilers, the Dobermans, the angry-hungry-killer-foaming-at-the-mouth mongrels going after me like I’m their sure-enough breakfast. After school, I was still running, running to my piano lessons. My teacher, Mrs. Crawley, said I had talent and a good shot to get into the junior orchestra. I felt a natural affinity for the classics. Loved me some Beethoven. Loved me some Mozart. Kept practicing—played violin as well—and even made it as first violin concert maestro, winning a statewide competition against some of the baddest kids in San Francisco and L.A.
Man, I’m running.
Running hard. Still trying to catch Cliff.
Cliff is a champion athlete. Cliff has aspirations to be the first black man to break the four-minute mile. Cliff and Dad take me to the backyard—there’s lots of land and empty lots in the suburbs of Glen Elder—and teach me baseball. Comes naturally. Even develop a curve ball.
“That’s a mean curve you got, bro,” says Cliff. “The thing just falls off the table. Keep working and no one will be able to touch that thing.”
I keep working. Mrs. Reed’s sons—Raymond and Duane—are my constant playmates who help me hone my skills. My pitch gets meaner. Batters keep falling. At age 8, I strike out every twelve-year-old in sight. At age twelve, the sixteen-year-olds can’t touch me. Cliff and Dad put me at second base.
“No one’s got eye-hand coordination like you, Corn,” says Cliff. “You can make it to the majors if you wanna.”
I just wanna keep running. Coaches encourage me. Dad and Cliff keep pushing me on. When the rainstorms come and I can’t run or play ball outside, Cliff and I make up little imaginary baseball leagues using yellow pencils as bats and toothpaste caps as balls. We invent track meets using dice to get the runners going.
Dad’s running us to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to see our heroes, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey and Hal Lanier, my role model as a second baseman. These are Giants.
“My boys are giants,” says Dad. “Giants in spirit. My boys have the hearts of lions.”
I’m going. I’m running. Mom is running to teach at school every day, brimming with enthusiasm for teaching the young kids to read. Every night before we go to bed she’s reading us poetry. I’m reading about Teddy Roosevelt who went to Harvard—hey, that gives me an idea: I wanna go to Harvard—and I’m relating to Teddy because, although he’s running throughout his life, he loses his breath, like me. We both suffer with asthma.
Asthma is frightening. Like the bridge over jagged rocks and the Rottweiler looking to bite off my backside, asthma threatens my life by cutting off my breath. Gotta stop. Can’t run. Start choking. Start panicking. Hate it when the asthma hits. The asthma keeps me from moving on. It’s keeping me from gaining ground. It’s got that death shudder falling all over me. What am I going to do about the asthma?
Orange, Texas. One hundred degrees in the shade. We’re visiting Mom’s people. I’m waking up in the middle of the night, choking, feeling close to death’s door. Cliff wakes up with me, gets me a glass of water, helps me catch my breath. But I see the fear in his eyes. I see the fear in Mom’s eyes the next morning when I get an asthma attack at breakfast.
At sundown, Cliff and I take a little jog around the neighborhood, just to stay in shape. I’m feeling a little better, but the lack of breath is always on my mind. We stop at a little convenience store to get some Kool-Aid.
“You seem to be breathing okay, bro,” says Cliff.
“For now,” I say, “but that asthma thing ain’t going away.”
A sister buying white bread overhears our conversation. She’s a middle-aged woman with a kindly air about her.
“If you suffer from asthma, son,” she says, “you best pay a visit to Madam Marie.”
“Who’s Madam Marie?” I ask.
“She’s got some remedies.”
“What kind of remedies?” Cliff wants to know.
“She can explain them,” says the kindly woman. “I can’t. All I know is they work.”
“She a God-fearing lady?” asks Cliff. “She a Christian?”
“She’s different. I’ll give you her address. If you decide to go by, say Miss Johnson sent you. She saved my boy when he was just about your age.”
That night Cliff and I tell Big Daddy, Mom’s father, what happened. Remember—Big Daddy is a deacon at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
“That’s a voodoo lady,” says Big Daddy. “No grandson of mine’s gonna have nothing to do with no voodoo lady.”
“What’s voodoo, Big Daddy?” I ask.
“It don’t come out of the Scriptures,” he answers. “Ain’t got nothing to do with what we believe.”
That night Cliff and I talk it over.
“Hate to go against what Big Daddy says,” I reflect, “but this asthma thing is getting no better. None of the regular treatments work. You think the voodoo can hurt me, Cliff?”
“I’ll come along with you to make sure it doesn’t.”
Madam Marie is a big woman who lives in a little one-room shack. She’s got strange things hanging from the ceiling—roots and peppers and beads. I tell her that Miss Johnson sent me.
“I see you don’t breathe right,” she says even before I explain my ailment.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“I have a cure.”
“How much will it cost?” asks Cliff with a hint of skepticism in his voice.
“If you got a little money, that’s fine. But money or not, baby, I’m giving you the cure.”
With that, Madam Marie gets up, takes a pair of scissors, and cuts a big tuft of hair from the back of my scalp. She leaves me looking something like a monk.
“Follow me, son,” she says.
Cliff and I follow her down an alley to where a long fence separates us from an open field. She stands me in front of the fence. Then she takes the tuft of hair she has cut, gathers it together with a rubber band, and glues it to the fence.
“Stand up straight,” she says.
I stand straight and listen as she speaks words that I don’t understand. A whole lot of conjuring goes on. She removes the hair and speaks some new words, just as incomprehensible as the first ones. I remain standing for several minutes. The tuft is placed back on the fence. I look out of the corner of my eye and see Cliff looking as if to say, “These folks are clean out of their minds!”
“Bless you, son,” says Madam Marie. “You’ll never have problems breathing again.”
And I never have.
I didn’t delve deeper into the mysteries of voodoo. I didn’t question Madam Marie and I didn’t try to explain what happened to anyone. In fact, when I got back to Big Daddy and he saw my bald spot and heard what happened, I caught hell. Always protective of me, Cliff tried to take the blame and said, “It was my idea.” But I told the truth and said it was my decision.
As the days and weeks and months went by, as I found myself free of even the smallest sign of an asthma problem, I was not tempted to abandon the love ethos of Christianity for voodooist practices. I did, however, see myself moving in a more ecumenical direction. I began to understand that answers to problems— physical, emotional, and spiritual—often require enquiries that go beyond the confines of a narrow dogma.
As to why the conjuring worked, I still have no idea.
O
UR SUMMERS IN
T
EXAS AND
O
KLAHOMA
were important times. These were, after all, the territories of my immediate origin, places where the countrified nature of my people—and of me—was nurtured. Just as much as California, Texas, and Oklahoma represented home.
The home of Grandma Lovie in Tulsa was especially impressive. As a result of her catering skill, she was a good earner who put her money into interior décor. Her house was immaculate. The silver was polished, the linen freshly laundered, her upholstered furniture spotless. I loved being there. Grandma gave me a feeling of well-being, not only because her beautifully appointed home offered security—the security that results from achievement against all odds—but because she was also deeply charitable. She fed the poor and cared for the downtrodden.
Yet she was also stern. When, for example, I disobeyed her by climbing a tree in her backyard and breaking a branch, she angered quickly.
“Get me a switch from the tree, boy.”
She took the switch and struck me. As the blow came down, I turned. That’s when Grandma Lovie inadvertently caught the side of my eye with the switch. It stung like crazy and left a permanent scar. If I had turned a fraction of an inch more, I might have lost the eye. Grandma Lovie cried out in remorse. “Lord Jesus!” she said, “I didn’t mean to do that.” For the rest of my life she never stopped apologizing.
C
OACH COULDN
’
T STOP APOLOGIZING
.
I understand that it wasn’t his fault, but, on some fundamental level, I remained shocked. This is another childhood blow that became clear years later. I’ll explain in a minute.
