Makeda (13 page)

Looking at the painting I said, “Ethiopia.”

“Of course,” she replied with a look of surprise, and favored me with an intoxicating smile.

Emboldened, I said, “Genesis, chapter 2.”

She gave me a quizzical look.

I said, “Eden, cradle of creation. Bordered by the Gihon River of Ethiopia. Genesis 2:13.” Showing off. Shamelessly.

“I’m impressed.” She continued to smile and look directly at me, nearly causing me to sway.

“Well, the truth is, my grandmother told me.”

“Your grandmother knows a lot about Ethiopia?”

“Seems to.”

She saw that I was trying to appear mysterious, clever. It amused her. She looked back at the painting.

“In any case, she knows a lot about the Bible,” I said softly.

We stood there for a while in silence enjoying the presence of each other.

“Your grandfather’s paintings are beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She smiled again.

“Is he still alive?” Clumsy.

“No …”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t be. He died when I was five. I remember visiting Haiti in the summers and sitting in his atelier, watching him paint.”

She pronounced the word
atelier
with a French accent.

I did not know what it meant. I did not ask.

I said, “I don’t know much about art.”

She asked, “Do paintings often engage you emotionally?”

“Yes, this one does, for instance.”

“We’re as old as the rivers, aren’t we?”

It wasn’t really a question. We looked again at the Philippe-Auguste painting that had forged the mood of her comment.

It was she who spoke next. “I think you know well enough the essentials of what you need to know about art.

The academics of it are less important.”

“Do animals like these live in Haiti?”

She smiled again. “No.”

“Why are they represented in so many of the paintings?”

“Enslaved Haitians strove hard to remember the Africa from which they had been torn. They clung to their religion, Voudoun, which encouraged the belief that they would return home from bondage to Guinea when they died. The animals are images from a memory of their homeland.”

I had, in the weeks since, played my impression of the encounter at the gallery over and over in my head in an effort to decode what I remembered of the words she had spoken to me. I was to see her again for dinner after I finished at the library. Walking across the Morgan quad toward the stone-clad building, I began to rehearse involuntarily what I would say when I saw her at seven.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

T
he damp, cold morning air tore about the square in blustery fits. I pulled the hood of my unlined nylon rain shell over my head and hunched against the blade of the wind. The two cement walkways that crossed at the center of the campus quad were laden with the traffic of students making their way to early-morning classes. Voices caught and died in the sharp gusts. Head bent low, I felt very much a stranger negotiating a forest of communing shadows. I set as swift a pace as I could and made it to the library without noticing a face that I recognized.

I had chosen the Harlem Renaissance poets to study and write about chiefly because they were black writers of a bygone era whose work was profoundly artistic, softshelled, and emotionally comprehensible to me. Indeed, they wrote with lamentation and sorrow, with rage and protestation, but, always and ever,
well
, their exposed and infectious humanity the proof of it. In a sad, glorious time before the broad American celebration and commercialization of crudity hatched itself upon the tender arts, these were writers, first and foremost, whose verse declined quietly the full surrender of poignance to anger, craft to politics, and taste to coarseness.

Or so I saw what may simply have been just another refuge of mine in which to hide from remembering.

I was working on the appendices and notes to my thesis paper. Langston Hughes, the best known of the Harlem Renaissance poets, was far and away the most prolific of them, and thereby claimed the largest section of my annotated references. The New York–born Countee Cullen, who died in 1946 at the age of forty-three, however, was my critical preference.

I stretched out a yawn and reared against the back of my chair which was sandwiched between metal racks of books on the fifth floor of the library’s stacks. I lolled my head and raised it in an arc to stare blankly into the industrial ceiling while remembering the lines of Cullen’s “Heritage.”

I smiled and reprised the exchange.

Eden, cradle of creation. Bordered by the Gihon River of Ethiopia. Genesis 2:13.

I’m impressed.

I’m impressed. I’m impressed. I’m impressed.

She had said this—and smiled. I hadn’t felt so good in a long, long while.

I liked being alone in the stacks. Most of Morgan State’s library users did their work in the main reading room, but I much preferred working at the little desk jammed against the wall cheek-by-jowl to books that spoke only when called upon. I had never particularly liked being alone before.

Geraldine Trice was a blurry character from that more normal, but now distant past life. As were my parents.

From that time before, only my grandmother crossed over into the unsettled space of my open daily thoughts. And Gordon, who was relentlessly present.

Two books on black poetry rested on the little desk. I pushed them flush to the upper corners and checked the alignment with the palm of my hand, swiping it along the edge of the desk. I placed my ruled spiral notebook on the desk in the center, taking care to leave it parallel with the sides of the desk top. I then put two ballpoint pens and a sharpened pencil on the desk to the left of the notebook, lined them up, and spaced them equidistant from each other. I checked the arrangement of the items carefully and found it satisfactory. I did not know why, but I had developed in recent years a need to impose order upon the small objects with which I did my work. I needed to know where everything was, not only my research materials, my drafts, notes, monographs, books, and the like, but also my stapler, my paperclips, rubber bands, and three-hole punch. It seemed to me that I took excessive care of these inconsequential possessions and I did not know why, because I had had no early or natural penchant for neatness.

I was an obsessive believer in the usefulness of list making. In adolescence, I had been disorganized and irresponsible, but, perhaps as a consequence, largely happy. Since then, I had imposed upon myself the discipline that was not installed earlier. This was much like the body discovering the need of a skeleton after it had been fully formed, and then resorting to wearing the mislaid bones on the outside of the body’s surface as a flexless cage. This made for considerable adult pain and smaller happiness, but in the last analysis, success, even though late-onset discipline was artificial and manifested itself in the obsessive making of, among other things, lists.

I wanted to be a writer. Why was that? Was I an artist, born to express, to create? Hardly. Had I then some perverse need to exert complete control over the tiniest of available disorders, over some little unit of something, at least: my notebooks, my pens, my pencil, my books, my excuses, my ineffectual explanations? Lists, for God’s sake.

Before it happened, I had told Daddy that I wanted to be a writer. This was after I had told Grandma. My father said that no one knew any black—no, what he said was “colored”—writers except the people who wrote for the
Afro-American
and did not get paid anything to speak of. “Or somebody like that communist Richard Wright, who ran off to France with a white woman, or somebody like James Baldwin who is a homosexual. Who’ve you ever known who was colored, Gray, that was normal like everyday people who made a living from writing?” I couldn’t answer this, and he gave me one of his
so there
looks. Had he heard of Zora Neale Hurston, who died penniless, he’d have thrown her in there too.

We knew a lot of black doctors. I don’t know how many there were, but enough to see after the more than 100,000 black people who lived in Richmond. And practically all of these black doctors were rich, even Dr. Grimes, the speculum butcher who’d killed Heidi Parker, a sixteen-year-old schoolmate, and left more than a few others barren for life.

Gordon was going to be a doctor. He was going to do something that not only made a lot of sense, but made a lot of money. And I was going to be a writer. “That’s crazy, boy, just plain crazy. When will you ever pull your head out of the clouds?”

I had put it in my graduation class yearbook anyhow.

Although I had long ago lost track of the book, I knew the notation was there beneath my cap-and-gown picture in the 1963
Rabza
:
Graylon March; Course, college preparatory; Activities,
English club, drama club; Ambition, writer.

I had been the only aspiring writer in my class, or in the whole high school, for that matter, if my science teacher, Mr. Garver, had it right. Certainly we’d heard of the famous black writers, but not one of our English teachers had required us to read anything that any of them had written.

For whatever the reason, I began as early as the eleventh grade to read their work on my own. I liked Richard Wright and identified strongly with his angry Bigger Thomas. I did not like Zora Neale Hurston, finding her Negro-dialect characters drawn more for the liking of white readers than black readers. I had been reassured to read that Richard Wright felt much the same way that I did about her. He was to write of her novel
Their Eyes Were
Watching God
: “In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”

For many of the same reasons I disliked Paul Laurence Dunbar while the white folks praised him as they had the fawning Phillis Wheatley. I had been impatient with Charles W. Chesnutt and gave up on him, perhaps much too early. I thought that James Baldwin, the only living black writer I’d had a chance to read, was, with his broadly encompassing race perspectives, the most relevant of all of them to black folks’ contemporary struggles.

I kept all of this to myself, however: whom I read, what I read, and what I thought about what I read. I did not share this with Mama and Daddy, who would both likely have been pleased that I was reading so much. I wanted to keep this for myself, an interest that I
owned
away from them, an incubating intellectual curiosity that I guarded as jealously as I did the Dogon dream notes in the plastic sleeve in the tin box at the back of the top shelf of my closet.

I read books I didn’t even tell my grandmother about. I did not want to hear anyone tell me that they were happy I had found an “interest.” I was having a one-way discussion with great black thinkers about matters more compelling than quantities and units, meters and measures, prospects and platitudes. I read on in small fear that I would be discovered by a caring person and subjected to a practical comment or a practical look or a practical anything. I had decided that I wanted to be a writer, the least
practical
career goal of any I had heard about. To have any chance at all of succeeding, I had to learn to think—that is, to think critically, to see from an imaginary space above, in one single sweep of vision, past and future, from the low, welltaught, mean ignorance of the present, in order to arrive at a voice that was mine, all mine, uncompromising to fools and concert-goers. Except for Grandma, who’d taught me to “look beyond the fence,” I felt completely alone.

Footfalls resounded through the dark narrow cement halls of the stacks, growing louder with the sharp, short strike of a woman’s heel. I turned from the wall to watch a tall, slender young woman I guessed to be eighteen or so approaching with two books under her arm. She wore a green dress and pumps that matched. Her hair was long and doctored to a brilliant sheen. Her makeup had been carefully applied over a tad-too-heavy base coat.

She said, “Hi.” Pleasant. Not pretty. Cute. Taking the effect of this for granted.

I said, “Good morning.”

“Are you Graylon March?”

“Yes.” A little impatient, but curious.

“You left a reference material slip in the box downstairs.”

“Oh, yes I did.” Remembering that indeed I had done so.

“We found two books for you.” She handed them to me.

“Thank you.”

She smiled but made no move to leave. I waited.

“It says on the slip that you are a candidate for a master’s degree in English.”

“Yes, I am.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, what could books on dreams and reincarnation have to do with English?”

I expelled a small sibilant breath through my teeth, evidencing involuntarily that the question had annoyed me.

The smile fell. She turned and left, the click of her heels coming faster as she retreated down the long hall toward the service elevator. I sighed, disappointed with myself. The girl had merely tried to be friendly.

I looked at the books for a while without opening them, as if I were reluctant to be presented with discouraging news. The first book was entitled,
Dreams and Their Meaning
, and had been written by a Robert Melroy. The volume had a self-published font and feel to it. I read a few lines from the introduction, judged the writing unscholarly, and laid the book aside. The second book,
Reincarnation: Case
Studies
, had been written by a Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright, a psychology professor on the faculty at the University of Southern California. The book had been published in 1964 by the Golden State University Press. The jacket notes featured three-line encomiums from Harry Grossman, a famous research psychologist, and five other professors from highly respected schools, including Dr. Broadus Benjamin, a pioneer in the field of paranormal phenomena.

I read first the table of contents and then leafed desultorily through the book, scanning a section here and there without much of a plan.