Modern American Memoirs (31 page)

“For what?”

“To go up there, of course. We're at his office, and I think we ought to be very direct. There aren't any trees to hide you, no grass to soften your steps. So, you walk right into his office. You make an announcement to the patients and the fancy nurses. You say, ‘I am the doctor's wife. I'm going to see my husband.' Then you step to the inner door and enter. Don't knock on any doors. Don't listen if the minor wife talks to you. You walk past her without changing pace. When you see him, you say, ‘Surprise!' You say, ‘Who is that woman out there? She claims to be your wife.' That will give him a chance to deny her on the spot.”

“Oh, I'm so scared. I can't move. I can't do that in front of all those people—like a stage show. I won't be able to talk.” And sure enough, her voice was fading into a whisper. She was shivering and small in the corner of the seat.

“So. A new plan, then,” said Brave Orchid, looking at her son, who had his forehead on the steering wheel. “You,” she said. “I want you to go up to his office and tell your uncle that there has been an accident out in the street. A woman's leg has been broken, and she's crying in pain. He'll have to come. You bring him to the car.”

“Mother.”

“Mm,” mused Brave Orchid. “Maybe we ought to put your aunt in
the middle of the street, and she can lie down with her leg bent under her.” But Moon Orchid kept shaking her head in trembling no's.

“Why don't you push her down in the intersection and pour ketchup on her? I'll run over her a little bit,” said her son.

“Stop being silly,” she said. “You Americans don't take life seriously.”

“Mother, this is ridiculous. This whole thing is ridiculous.”

“Go. Do what I tell you,” she said.

“I think your schemes will be useless, Mother.”

“What do you know about Chinese business?” she said. “Do as I say.”

“Don't let him bring the nurse,” said Moon Orchid.

“Don't you want to see what she looks like?” asked Brave Orchid. “Then you'll know what he's giving up for you.”

“No. No. She's none of my business. She's unimportant.”

“Speak in English,” Brave Orchid told her son. “Then he'll feel he has to come with you.”

She pushed her son out of the car. “I don't want to do this,” he said.

“You'll ruin your aunt's life if you don't. You can't understand business begun in China. Just do what I say. Go.”

Slamming the car door behind him, he left.

Moon Orchid was groaning now and holding her stomach. “Straighten up,” said Brave Orchid. “He'll be here any moment.” But this only made Moon Orchid groan louder, and tears seeped out between her closed eyelids.

“You want a husband, don't you?” said Brave Orchid. “If you don't claim him now, you'll never have a husband. Stop crying,” she ordered. “Do you want him to see you with your eyes and nose swollen when that young so-called wife wears lipstick and nail polish like a movie star?”

Moon Orchid managed to sit upright, but she seemed stiff and frozen.

“You're just tired from the ride. Put some blood into your cheeks,” Brave Orchid said, and pinched her sister's withered face. She held her sister's elbow and slapped the inside of her arm. If she had had time, she would have hit until the black and red dots
broke out on the skin; that was the tiredness coming out. As she hit, she kept an eye on the rearview mirror. She saw her son come running, his uncle after him with a black bag in his hand. “Faster. Faster,” her son was saying. He opened the car door. “Here she is,” he said to his uncle. “I'll see you later.” And he ran on down the street.

The two old ladies saw a man, authoritative in his dark western suit, start to fill the front of the car. He had black hair and no wrinkles. He looked and smelled like an American. Suddenly the two women remembered that in China families married young boys to older girls, who baby-sat their husbands their whole lives. Either that or, in this ghost country, a man could somehow keep his youth.

“Where's the accident?” he said in Chinese. “What is this? You don't have a broken leg.”

Neither woman spoke. Brave Orchid held her words back. She would not let herself interfere with this meeting after long absence.

“What is it?” he asked. “What's wrong?” These women had such awful faces. “What is it, Grandmothers?”

“Grandmother?” Brave Orchid shouted. “This is your wife. I am your sister-in-law.”

Moon Orchid started to whimper. Her husband looked at her. And recognized her. “You,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

But all she did was open and shut her mouth without any words coming out.

“Why are you here?” he asked, eyes wide. Moon Orchid covered her face with one hand and motioned no with the other.

Brave Orchid could not keep silent. Obviously he was not glad to see his wife. “I sent for her,” she burst out. “I got her name on the Red Cross list, and I sent her the plane ticket. I wrote her every day and gave her the heart to come. I told her how welcome she would be, how her family would welcome her, how her husband would welcome her. I did what you, the husband, had time to do in these last thirty years.”

He looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies. “What do you want?” he asked. She shrank from his stare; it silenced her crying.

“You weren't supposed to come here,” he said, the front seat a barrier against the two women over whom a spell of old age had
been cast. “It's a mistake for you to be here. You can't belong. You don't have the hardness for this country. I have a new life.”

“What about me?” whispered Moon Orchid.

“Good,” thought Brave Orchid. “Well said. Said with no guile.”

“I have a new wife,” said the man.

“She's only your second wife,” said Brave Orchid. “This is your real wife.”

“In this country a man may have just one wife.”

“So you'll get rid of that creature in your office?” asked Brave Orchid.

He looked at Moon Orchid. Again the rude American eyes. “You go live with your daughter. I'll mail you the money I've always sent you. I could get arrested if the Americans knew about you. I'm living like an American.” He talked like a child born here.

“How could you ruin her old age?” said Brave Orchid.

“She has had food. She has had servants. Her daughter went to college. There wasn't anything she thought of that she couldn't buy. I have been a good husband.”

“You made her live like a widow.”

“That's not true. Obviously the villagers haven't stoned her. She's not wearing mourning. The family didn't send her away to work. Look at her. She'd never fit into an American household. I have important American guests who come inside my house to eat.” He turned to Moon Orchid, “You can't talk to them. You can barely talk to me.”

Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.

“Do you want her to go back to China then?” Brave Orchid was asking.

“I wouldn't wish that on anyone. She may stay, but I do not want her in my house. She has to live with you or with her daughter, and I don't want either of you coming here anymore.”

Suddenly his nurse was tapping on the glass. So quickly that they might have missed it, he gestured to the old women, holding a finger to his mouth for just a moment: he had never told his
American wife that he had a wife in China, and they mustn't tell her either.

“What's happening?” she asked. “Do you need help? The appointments are piling up.”

“No. No,” he said. “This woman fainted in the street. I'll be up soon.”

They spoke to each other in English.

The two old women did not call out to the young woman. Soon she left. “I'm leaving too now,” said the husband.

“Why didn't you write to tell her once and for all you weren't coming back and you weren't sending for her?” Brave Orchid asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “It's as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.”

“The least you can do,” said Brave Orchid, “is invite us to lunch. Aren't you inviting us to lunch? Don't you owe us a lunch? At a good restaurant?” She would not let him off easily.

So he bought them lunch, and when Brave Orchid's son came back to the car, he had to wait for them.

Moon Orchid was driven back to her daughter's house, but though she lived in Los Angeles, she never saw her husband again. “Oh, well,” said Brave Orchid. “We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.” Brave Orchid and her son drove back north, Brave Orchid sitting in the back seat the whole way.

As a teenager, James Baldwin preached the gospel in Harlem. After high school, he relocated to Greenwich Village to write, and published articles in
The Nation
and
Commentary.

In 1948, he moved to Paris, keeping his U.S. citizenship. “I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me.” In 1953, he published the celebrated novel
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
and two years later, the nonfiction volume
Notes of a Native Son.

He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a commander of the Legion of Honor. When he died, he was working on a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr
.

 

from N
OTES OF A
N
ATIVE
S
ON

O
n the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes
along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.

I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.

He had been born in New Orleans and had been a quite young man there during the time that Louis Armstrong, a boy, was running errands for the dives and honky-tonks of what was always presented to me as one of the most wicked of cities—to this day, whenever I think of New Orleans, I also helplessly think of Sodom and Gomorrah. My father never mentioned Louis Armstrong, except to forbid us to play his records; but there was a picture of him on our wall for a long time. One of my father's strong-willed female relatives had placed it there and forbade my father to take it down. He never did, but he eventually maneuvered her out of the house and when, some years later, she was in trouble and near death, he refused to do anything to help her.

He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs and from my own memories of him, dressed in his Sunday best and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere, when I was little. Handsome, proud, and ingrown, “like a toe-nail,” somebody said. But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met;
yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost unfailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he often brought home on his back in the summertime led to the most appalling scenes. I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven him out of New Orleans. There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went from church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.

When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father's bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.

He had been ill a long time—in the mind, as we now realized, reliving instances of his fantastic intransigence in the new light of his affliction and endeavoring to feel a sorrow for him which never, quite, came true. We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him. The younger children felt, quite simply, relief that he would not be coming home anymore. My mother's observation that it was he, after all, who had kept them alive all these years meant nothing because the problems of keeping children alive are not real for children. The older children felt, with my father gone, that they could invite their friends to the house without fear that their friends would be insulted or, as had sometimes happened with me, being told that their friends were in league with the devil and intended to rob our family of everything we owned. (I didn't fail to wonder, and it made me hate him, what on earth we owned that anybody else would want.)

His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone realized that he was ill. He had always been so strange and had lived, like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with the Lord that his long silences which were punctuated by moans and hallelujahs and snatches of old songs while he sat at the living-room window never seemed odd to us. It was not until he refused to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him that my mother was forced to accept as a fact what had, until then, been only an unwilling suspicion. When he was committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him.

In my mind's eye I could see him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he could barely feed. He used to make little jokes about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such rages. He spent great energy and achieved, to our chagrin, no small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should have been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox Avenue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost everybody on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate.

The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who dealt with them, for my father's temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stiff, and by his voice, harsh and vindictively polite. When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest in me, and gave me books to read and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she somewhat tactlessly referred to as “real” plays. Theatergoing was forbidden in our house, but, with the really cruel intuitiveness of a child, I suspected that the color of this woman's skin would carry the day for me. When, at school, she suggested taking me to the theater, I did not, as I might have done if she had been a Negro, find a way of discouraging her, but agreed that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, very cleverly, left all the rest to my mother, who suggested to my father, as I knew she would, that it would not be very nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for nothing. Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that my
mother countered the idea of sin with the idea of “education,” which word, even with my father, carried a kind of bitter weight.

Before the teacher came my father took me aside to ask
why
she was coming, what
interest
she could possibly have in our house, in a boy like me. I said I didn't know but I, too, suggested that it had something to do with education. And I understood that my father was waiting for me to say something—I didn't quite know what; perhaps that I wanted his protection against this teacher and her “education.” I said none of these things and the teacher came and we went out. It was clear, during the brief interview in our living room, that my father was agreeing very much against his will and that he would have refused permission if he had dared. The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.

Later, when my father had been laid off from his job, this woman became very important to us. She was really a very sweet and generous woman and went to a great deal of trouble to be of help to us, particularly during one awful winter. My mother called her by the highest name she knew. She said she was a “christian.” My father could scarcely disagree but during the four or five years of our relatively close association he never trusted her and was always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the genuine, cunningly hidden, and hideous motivation. In later years, particularly when it began to be clear that this “education” of mine was going to lead me to perdition, he became more explicit and warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.

But the year which preceded my father's death had made a great change in my life. I had been living in New Jersey, working in defense plants, working and living among southerners, white and black. I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it
had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect
me
to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people. I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself—I had to
act
that way—with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I had scarcely arrived before I had earned the enmity, which was extraordinarily ingenious, of all my superiors and nearly all my co-workers. In the beginning, to make matters worse, I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know what I had done, and I shortly began to wonder what
anyone
could possibly do, to bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility. I knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it. I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again.