Modern American Memoirs (50 page)

 

As the years went by, I had carefully not let myself hope that I would have grandchildren, as I knew before Catherine had children I would be old enough to be a great-grandmother. Great-grandmotherhood is something we do not think of as a likely possibility of the human condition, even now when it is becoming more common.

But I did think how delightful it would be, if it happened, to see my daughter with a child. And I wondered what kind of child Catherine and Barkev Kassarjian would have—she with her long ancestry from the British Isles and he with his long Armenian her
itage in the Middle East, she with her English fairness and he with his dark eyes and black hair. Thinking back to my grandmother and my mother and the kind of mother I had tried to be and remembering all the different kinds of mothering people who had cared for my daughter in her childhood—her English nanny, her lovely young aunt Mary, and her devoted godmother, Aunt Marie, who brought in the generation of my grandmother's day when people respected heirlooms and passed their dolls on from generation to generation—I wondered what kind of child my daughter would have and what kind of mother she would be….

 

When Catherine and Barkev lost their first baby in the Philippines—Martin, who was born too soon and lived only long enough to be christened and registered as a citizen—I knew that they both wanted a child very much. I knew also that bereavement had catapulted Catherine into the same position in which I had been placed by a long series of disappointed hopes; just as I had been, she was potentially an overprotective mother. And as I had done, she would have to school herself to give her child the freedom to take risks. I could feel again the terrible tingle in the calves of my legs that I had felt when Cathy became an intrepid climber of tall pine trees.

The baby they now expected was to be born in one of the best hospitals in the country, a hospital that had respect for fathers and one in which a mother had some hope of establishing breast feeding. Catherine had already selected as her pediatrician T.Berry Brazelton, who is playing an avant-garde role in his concern for child development. She had decided to combine motherhood with her work. During the summer before the baby was born she went to Austria to take part in a seminar organized by her father, and she planned to teach in the fall. The baby was due in September. Like so many other young people in the United States, Catherine and Barkev planned to move just before the baby was born, and so added to other complications all the confusion of making a new home.

When they moved in, the newly remodeled house—in which there was a small apartment for a baby-sitting young professional couple—was not finished. Teaching began, and the baby was not yet born. In the end, in spite of careful planning, something went wrong with the telephone connection to Barkev, a few blocks away,
and Catherine was taken to the hospital in the fire chief's car summoned from the concerned fire department across the street. It was a modern version of having the baby born while the mother is out fishing in a canoe, far from the village and the waiting midwife.

When the news came that Sevanne Margaret was born, I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being. This was one thing that had never come up in discussions of grandparenthood and had never before occurred to me. In many primitive societies grandparents and grandchildren are aligned together. A child who has to treat his father with extreme respect may joke with his grandfather and playfully call his grandmother “wife.” The tag that grandparents and grandchildren get along so well because they have a common enemy is explicitly faced in many societies. In our own society the point most often made is that grandparents can enjoy their grandchildren because they have no responsibility for them, they do not have to discipline them and they lack the guilt and anxiety of parenthood. All these things were familiar. But I had never thought how strange it was to be involved at a distance in the birth of a biological descendant.

I always have been acutely aware of the way one life touches another—of the ties between myself and those whom I have never met, but who read
Coming of Age in Samoa
and decided to become anthropologists. From the time of my childhood I was able to conceive of my relationship to all my forebears, some of whose genes I carry, both those I did not know even by name and those who helped to bring me up, particularly my paternal grandmother. But the idea that as a grandparent one was dealing with action at a distance—that somewhere, miles away, a series of events occurred that changed one's own status forever—I had not thought of that and I found it very odd.

I felt something like the shock that must be felt by those who have lived all their lives secure in their citizenship in the nation of their birth and who then, suddenly, by the arbitrary act of some tyrannical government, find that they are disenfranchised—as happened to the old aristocracy in Russia after the revolution, to the Jews in Germany in the 1930's, and to the Turkish Armenians in Turkey. But of course what happened to me was not an arbitrary denial of something I had regarded as irreversibly given, but rather
an arbitrary confirmation of a state which I felt that I myself had done nothing to bring about. Scientists and philosophers have speculated at length about the sources of man's belief that he is a creature with a future life or, somewhat less commonly, with a life that preceded his life on earth. Speculation may be the only kind of answer that is possible, but I would now add to the speculations that are more familiar another of my own: the extraordinary sense of having been transformed not by any act of one's own but by the act of one's child.

Then, as a new grandmother, I began both to relive my own daughter's infancy and to observe the manifestations of temperament in the tiny creature who was called Vanni—to note how she learned to ignore the noisy carpentry as the house was finished around her but was so sensitive to changes in the human voice that her mother had to keep low background music playing to mask the change in tone of voice that took place when someone who had been speaking then answered the telephone. I remarked how she responded to pattern in the brightly colored chintzes and the mobiles that had been prepared for her. I showed the movies of Cathy's birth and early childhood, to which my daughter commented, “I think my baby is brighter”—or prettier, or livelier—“than your baby!”

However, I felt none of the much trumpeted freedom from responsibility that grandparents are supposed to feel. Actually, it seems to me that the obligation to be a resource but not an interference is just as preoccupying as the attention one gives to one's own children. I think we do not allow sufficiently for the obligation we lay on grandparents to keep themselves out of the picture—not to interfere, not to spoil, not to insist, not to intrude—and, if they are old and frail, to go and live apart in an old people's home (by whatever name it may be called) and to say that they are happy when, once in a great while, their children bring their grandchildren to visit them.

Most American grandparents are supported in their laborious insistence on not being a nuisance by the way they felt toward their own parents and by the fierceness with which, as young adults, they resented interference by their parents and grandparents. But I had none of this. I had loved my grandmother and I had valued the way
my mother nursed and loved her children. My only complaint when I took Cathy home as a baby was that Mother could not remember as much as I would have liked about the things it was useful to know. And I had quite gladly shared my baby with her nurse and with my closest friends.

I had hoped that Helen Burrows could come back to Catherine to take care of the new baby. But she was ill. Instead, Tulia Sampeur, my godson's Haitian nurse, went up to Cambridge to look after the new baby with her sure and practiced hands. Watching her, Catherine was able to explore the tremendous suggestibility of a new mother, who initially learns to follow the procedures in the care of her baby to which she is exposed immediately after delivery with a rigidity that is strangely reminiscent of the way in which young ducklings are imprinted to follow whatever moving figure they see. Catherine learned, as I had learned, that having a baby teaches you a great deal about mothers, however much you already may know about babies.

John Edgar Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a basketball star and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar
.

Wideman's moving Homewood trilogy consists of
Damballah
(1981)
; Hiding Place
(1981); and
Sent For You Yesterday
(1983), which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. In 1992, the University of Pittsburgh Press brought out the trilogy under one cover as
The Homewood Books.
He has written several other novels, including
Philadelphia Fire
(1990), and two collections of short stories
. Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
(1994) is his most recent work
.

Wideman's memoir,
Brothers and Keepers,
was nominated for the National Book Award in 1984. It concerns his younger brother Robert, who was then serving a life sentence at Western State Penitentiary. Wideman addresses much of the book directly to “Robby,” in speaking tones.

 

from B
ROTHERS AND
K
EEPERS

W
hen you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new, rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then? Twenty-odd years later, when you shuffled through the polished corridor of the Fort Collins, Colorado, courthouse dragging the weight of iron chains and fetters, I wanted to give you my hands again, help you make it across the floor again; I shot out a clenched fist, a black power sign, which caught your eye and made you smile in that citadel of whiteness. You made me realize I was tottering on the edge, leaning on you. You, in your baggy jumpsuit, three days' scraggly growth on your face because they didn't trust
you with a razor, manacled hand and foot so you were theatrically displayed as their pawn, absolutely under their domination; you were the one clinging fast, taking the weight, and your dignity held me up. I was reaching for your strength.

Always there. The bad seed, the good seed. Mommy's been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby…he wakes up in the morning looking for the party. She's right, ain't she? Mom's nearly always right in her way, the special way she has of putting words together to take things apart. Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party. Still up there on the third floor under his covers and he's thinking, Where's it at today? What's it gonna be today? Where's the fun? And that's how he's been since the day the Good Lord put him on this earth. That's your brother, Robert Douglas Wideman.

 

The Hindu god Venpadigedera returned to earth and sang to the people: Behold, the light shineth in all things. Birds, trees, the eyes of men, all giveth forth the light. Behold and be glad. Gifts wait for any who choose to see. Cover the earth with flowers. Shower flowers to the four corners. Rejoice in the bounty of the light.

 

The last time we were all together, cousin Kip took a family portrait. Mom and Daddy in a line with their children. The third generation of kids, a nappy-headed row in front. Five of us grown-up brothers and sisters hanging on one another's shoulders. Our first picture together since I don't remember when. We're all standing on Mom's about-to-buckle porch with cousin Kip down in the weeds of the little front yard pointing his camera up at us. I was half-scared those rickety boards would crack and we'd sink, arms still entwined, like some brown
Titanic
, beneath the rippling porch floor.

Before I saw the picture I had guessed how we'd look frozen in shades of black and white. I wasn't too far off. Tish is grinning ear to ear—the proud girl child in the middle who's survived the teasing and protections of her four brothers. Even though he isn't, Gene seems the tallest because of the way he holds that narrow, perfect head of his balanced high and dignified on his long neck. Dave's eyes challenge the camera, meet it halfway and dare it to come any closer,
and the camera understands and keeps its distance from the smoldering eyes. No matter what Dave's face seems to be saying—the curl of the lip that could be read as smile or sneer, as warning or invitation—his face also projects another level of ambiguity, the underground history of interracial love, sex, and hate, what a light-eyed, brown-skinned man like David embodies when he confronts other people. I'm grinning too (it's obvious Tish is my sister) because our momentary togetherness was a reprieve, a possibility I believed I'd forfeited by my selfishness and hunger for more. Giddy almost, I felt like a rescued prince ringed by his strong, handsome people, my royal brothers and sister who'd paid my ransom. Tickled even by the swell and pitch of the rotting porch boards under my sandals.

You. You are mugging. Your best side dramatically displayed. The profile shot you'd have demanded on your first album, the platinum million seller you'd never cut but knew you could because you had talent and brains and you could sing and mimic anybody and that long body of yours and those huge hands were instruments more flexible and expressive than most people's faces. You knew what you were capable of doing and knew you'd never get a chance to do it, but none of that defeat for the camera, no, only the star's three-quarter profile. Billy Eckstineing your eyes, the Duke of Earl tilting the slim oval of your face forward to emphasize the pout of your full lips, the clean lines of your temples and cheekbones tapering down from the Afro's soft explosion. Your stage would be the poolroom, the Saturday-night basement social, the hangout corner, the next chick's pad you swept into with all the elegance of Smokey Robinson and the Count of Monte Cristo, slowly unbuttoning your cape, inching off your kid gloves, everything pantomimed with gesture and eye flutters till your rap begins and your words sing that much sweeter, purer for the quiet cradling them. You're like that in the picture. Stylized, outrageous under your big country straw hat pushed back off your head. Acting. And Tish, holding up the picture to study it, will say something like, Look at you, boy. You ought to be 'shamed. And your mask will drop and you'll grin cause Tish is like Mom, and ain't no getting round her. So you'll just grin back and you are Robby again at about age seven, cute and everybody's pet, grin at Sis and say, “G'wan, girl.”

Daddy's father, our grandfather, Harry Wideman, migrated
from Greenwood, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He found a raw, dirty, double-dealing city. He learned its hills and rivers, the strange names of Dagos and Hunkies and Polacks who'd been drawn, as he had, by steel mills and coal mines, by the smoke and heat and dangerous work that meant any strong-backed, stubborn young man, even a black one, could earn pocketfuls of money. Grandpa's personal quest connected him with hordes of other displaced black men seeking a new day in the promised land of the North. Like so many others, he boarded in an overcrowded rooming house, working hard by day, partying hard at night against the keen edge of exhaustion. When his head finally hit the pillow, he didn't care that the sheets were still warm from the body of the man working nights who rented the bed ten hours a day while Harry pulled his shift at the mill.

 

Harry Wideman was a short, thick, dark man whose mahogany color passed on to Daddy, blended with the light, bright skin of John and Freeda French's daughter Bette to produce the brown we wear. Do you remember anything about him, or were you too young? Have you ever wondered how the city appeared through his eyes, the eyes of a rural black boy far from home, a stranger in a strange land? Have you ever been curious? Grandpa took giant steps forward in time. As a boy not quite old enough to be much help in the fields, his job was looking out for Charley Rackett, his ancient, crippled grandfather, an African, a former slave. Grandpa listened to Charley Rackett's African stories and African words, then lived to see white men on the moon. I think of Grandpa high up on Bruston Hill looking over the broad vista spreading out below him. He's young and alone; he sees things with his loins as much as his eyes. Hills rolling to the horizon, toward the invisible rivers, are breasts and buttocks. Shadowed spaces, nestling between the rounded hills, summon him. Whatever happens to him in this city, whatever he accomplishes will be an answer to the soft, insinuating challenge thrown up at him as he stares over the teeming land. This city will measure his manhood.
Our Father Who Art
…I hear prayer words interrupting his dreaming, disturbing the woman shapes his glance fashions from the landscape. The earth turns. He plants his seed. In the blink of an eye he's an old man, close to death. He has watched
the children of his children's children born in this city. Some of his children's children dead already. He ponders the wrinkled tar paper on the backs of his hands. Our Father. A challenge still rises from the streets and rooftops the way it once floated up from long-gone, empty fields. And the old man's no nearer now to knowing, to understanding why the call digs so deeply at his heart.

 

Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand. Black music, blues and jazz, came to town in places like the Pythian Temple, the Ritz, the Savoy, the Showboat. In the bars on the North Side, Homewood, and the Hill you could get whatever you thought you wanted. Gambling, women, a good pork chop. Hundreds of families took in boarders to earn a little extra change. A cot in a closet in somebody's real home seemed nicer, better than the dormitories with their barracks-style rows of beds, no privacy, one toilet for twenty men. Snores and funk, eternal coming and going because nobody wanted to remain in those kennels one second longer than he had to. Fights, thieves, people dragged in stinking drunk or bloody from the streets, people going straight to work after hanging out all night with some whore and you got to smell him and smell her beside you while you trying to pull your shift in all that heat. Lawd. Lawdy. Got no money in the bank. Joints was rowdy and mean and like I'm telling you if some slickster don't hustle your money in the street or a party-time gal empty your pockets while you sleep and you don't nod off and fall in the fire, then maybe you earn you a few quarters to send home for that wife and them babies waiting down yonder for you if she's still waiting and you still sending. If you ain't got no woman to send for then maybe them few quarters buy you a new shirt and a bottle of whiskey so you can find you some trifling body give all your money to.

 

The strong survive. The ones who are strong and
lucky
. You can take that back as far as you want to go. Everybody needs one father,
two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and that's only eight generations backward in time, eight generations linked directly, intimately with what you are. Less than 150 years ago, 128 men made love to 128 women, not all in the same hotel or on the same day but within a relatively short expanse of time, say twenty years, in places as distant as Igboland, New Amsterdam, and South Carolina. Unknown to each other, probably never even coming face to face in their lifetimes, each of these couples was part of the grand conspiracy to produce you. Think of a pyramid balanced on one of its points, a vast cone of light whose sides flare outward, vectors of force like the slanted lines kids draw to show a star's shining. You once were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever-expanding V that opens to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram's horn or conch shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle's eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door.

 

The old people die. Our grandfathers, Harry Wideman and John French, are both gone now. The greatest space and no space at all separates us from them. I see them staring, dreaming this ravaged city; and we are in the dream, it's our dream, enclosed, enclosing. We could walk down into that valley they saw from atop Bruston Hill and scoop up the houses, dismantle the bridges and tall buildings, pull cars and trucks off the streets, roll up roads and highways and stuff them all like toys into the cotton-picking sacks draped over our shoulders. We are that much larger than the things that happen to us. Accidents like the city poised at the meeting of three rivers, the city strewn like litter over precipitous hills.

Did our grandfathers run away from the South? Black Harry from Greenwood, South Carolina, mulatto white John from Culpepper, Virginia. How would they answer that question? Were they running from something or running to something? What did you figure you were doing when you started running? When did
your flight begin? Was escape the reason or was there a destination, a promised land exerting its pull? Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running
from
and running
to?
Is freedom the motive and means and end and everything in between?

I wonder if the irony of a river beside the prison is intentional. The river was brown last time I saw it, mud-brown and sluggish in its broad channel. Nothing pretty about it, a working river, a place to dump things, to empty sewers. The Ohio's thick and filthy, stinking of coal, chemicals, offal, bitter with rust from the flaking hulls of iron-ore barges inching grayly to and from the steel mills. But viewed from barred windows, from tiered cages, the river must call to the prisoners' hearts, a natural symbol of flight and freedom. The river is a path, a gateway to the West, the frontier. Somewhere it meets the sea. Is it somebody's cruel joke, an architect's way of giving the knife a final twist, hanging this sign outside the walls, this river always visible but a million miles away beyond the spiked steel fence guarding its banks?