Black Deutschland (21 page)

I was surprised by his coherence and moved by his leniency, so much so that I continued to drink in town and to fall behind in my classes. I filled out the withdrawal documents in a fog of being tired and broke, unable to make up the work for the term, unable to do my laundry because I didn’t have quarters, didn’t have the energy to carry that enormous bag to the basement, and I didn’t care. My tab had been cut off at the bar downtown where I drank underage.

The disgust my parents felt at my coming home a dropout was too much for me to handle. When the nervous breakdown didn’t come and the locked liquor cabinet turned out to be unlocked and empty of everything except flat tonic, I called an old flame and met her at a black bar where an overweight white girl might expect some action. We got completely drunk. She paid. I could hear her laughter as her taxi lurched out of the parking lot.

I got in the car borrowed from my brother, his army-green Mercury Coupe, his beloved Tank. I thought of how my father had taught me one day at the
Eagle
to tip my cap to the ladies. I was such a hit. The memory brought me to tears. I started up my brother’s Tank, roared out of the parking lot, and within three minutes had careened off a post and flipped the car over beside a disused brown railroad track, the giant warehouse into which it had once run long gone.

I remember saying to myself in a British accent, “I’m all right.” The car was on its left side. I could see that the windows were either broken by the impact or scratched by the gravel the car had slid across. I was in my seat belt. The radio was going. “Aha,” I said, still in Bunbury’s voice, and pressed the window button. The left one cracked horribly and I pulled myself up quickly, away from bouncing glass pieces. But the window on the right had gone down. I unbuckled and reached up. I hoisted myself up and fell over the side, jumping back from contact with the hot underbelly of the vehicle. I got to my feet. No one was around.

I went three blocks before I saw a convenience store. I said in a heavy Bunbury-British accent to the black man behind the Plexiglas shield, “I say, I’ve had an accident.” Incredibly, I had no injuries.

I never saw the tow truck. I was gone from the scene before it arrived. The police dropped me at the hospital, perplexed by my bright British accent. Dad and Solomon picked me up. Mom waited at home with something new in her eyes. The crazies staying with us had sat up with her. Dad fixed things with a judge. The car had been hit while parked in the lot of the Sweet End Tavern, the insurance story said. I missed most of the aftermath. I slept through it. I slept for two days. Mom was worried that I might have a concussion. When at last I woke, they were standing over me. Solomon asked if I was all right.

I cried, which spoiled things. They went away, except for Mom. But here my brother had been looking as though someone had shot the dog we’d never had and the first thing out of his mouth was to ask if I was okay. When Cello went into how much he disliked me, I remembered that about him and held on to it, as they say.

After that, I pulled myself together for a while, so much so that Solomon asked me to cease my hysterically punctual payments. The debt kept us more in touch than he wanted to be. Dad stopped talking to me pretty much and Mom nattered in order to cover up her disappointment.

*   *   *

“The fun never sets,” Dad said as he passed by. He had never been the sort of black guy who could get people laughing by remembering neck bones and rice in the Second Ward. “There is life after Sears, Roebuck.” He was acting as though he were glad-handing his way around a crowded room, but what he was doing was revolving from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room and back, clapping the same dozen people on the back and saying anything that seemed jolly, spirit-keeping.

The need to smoke had reduced the number of mourners. The house had quieted down considerably. Aunt Gloria had been in the bathroom for some time. Ralston Jr.’s pockets were full of baby carrots. I was sure that he was counting between carrots, timing each one. The television was on still, but nobody paid attention, loud as it was. Mom was in earnest conversation with the priest. We didn’t notice that Solomon had let himself in.

“You arranged for the pilot, I presume,” Ralston Jr. said.

Uncle Ralston was up, tottering toward Solomon, as out of it as his damaged son. “Take me to North Carolina this instant.” The old dictator making demands before he’d accept exile.

But my brother had Mom hanging on to his shoulders and Dad fastened to his ribs. I was in a sports bar with Solomon when Harold Washington was first elected.

“Never gave the time of day.” Mrs. Williams must have been eighty, at least, someone who could remember big floods down South and weevils in the cotton and the day the Armistice was signed. Yet she was a display totem of mascara and lipstick and red nail polish and jangling bangles, her grandson’s, the late Clark’s, perhaps, as she stumbled from chair to chair in Uncle Ralston’s direction. For some reason, I thought of Manfred’s car.

“Solomon, you’ve been drinking,” Mom said.

“Oh, you think you can smack me?” Mrs. Williams and Uncle Ralston rocked back and forth at each other, unsteady, furious, moist-mouthed, and unable to strike.

“I had brunch with my fiancée and her parents downtown. Francesca’s parents had their car drop me off.” Solomon had to disengage himself from Dad’s look at Mom—and hers right back at him.

Mom was happier than anyone when after four years Solomon broke up with that Vietnamese chick and her Pentecostal family in San Francisco. Maybe he was still a registered Republican, but at least he didn’t accept Christ as his personal savior anymore. He didn’t share his dating life with me, but obviously this was the first Mom and Dad had heard of someone named Francesca.

Because Solomon was away on athletic camp scholarships every summer, he never put in his time at the newspaper. Yet Uncle Ralston would run stories about Solomon’s class in Fortran for gifted high school students at the Illinois Institute of Technology, his picture bigger than any he ever printed of his granddaughter Cello. Uncle Ralston would make a toast at office lunches, the rambling contents of which could touch on the idea that one day all-star Solomon would take up the chair as editor, but clearly just as a way of introducing himself to the city before he embarked on a political career.

It wasn’t just Uncle Ralston and Mom’s gun-happy mother who were in love with Solomon. He was everybody’s shining black prince. Cello’s brother, Ronald, was almost tragic in his worship. Cello certainly approved of him as a relation. He had always been welcome in her biography. But now that I felt like a stronger candidate for her index, I was determined to be different with my brother. I was going to pour down the drain behavior brewed in envy and low self-esteem.

Solomon and I never had the talk, the scene where the older brother says that he always sort of figured his pain-in-the-ass little brother was, well, that way, because of those lame comics and how scared he was of water or balls of any kind aimed at him. But the talk with Mom and Dad had gone so badly, to my lasting astonishment, I decided not to have any more talks with anyone for a while. “I heard,” Solomon said at the time, and nothing else.

Mrs. Williams was trying to keep her balance as she traced the air in front of her like someone wielding a razor. “You such a big fool, you do not believe we landed on the moon.”

Dad himself had pulled Uncle Ralston’s editorial denouncing as a hoax the Apollo 11 landing in the Sea of Tranquility. But Uncle Ralston forced him to print the thing the next week. Dad often said that that was the turning point, the summer of 1969. Anyone any good on the
Eagle
began to leave after that.

The priest turned off the television and announced that he was going to find some music. I was excited that Solomon drew me to him, out of Mrs. Williams’s path.

“Francesca is perfect. We both grew up in the Windy City and had to meet in the City by the Bay.”

He squeezed my right bicep and I heard myself giggle and felt my teeth show. I saw Mom and Dad put their arms around each other at the sight of their eldest showing affection for his little brother. They acted as if he were ten years older than me. Behind them, I could see the attorney and Aunt Gloria in the same pose, but their eyes were closed. Their heads touched. Uncle Ralston and Mrs. Williams paddle-wheeled at each other. They both missed. They went past each other, as in a jousting competition.

Mrs. Williams was the lucky one, falling facedown into an easy chair, while on the other side of the room people sprang out of the way and several chairs went down sideways with Uncle Ralston like bowling pins.

“Hammer time!” Ralston Jr. screamed from the windowsill. “It’s hammer time!”

I felt Solomon’s arm around my neck and thought I heard applause. “You okay? You’re being careful? Good. Listen up, you have to help us out here, Jeddo. The truth is, Francesca and I are married already. How do I tell Mom we pulled a no-wedding on everybody. Francesca’s father and mother weren’t there either. The last four hours have been real Sidney Poitier, blood. You don’t still do that Katharine Hepburn routine you used to do? I hope not.”

*   *   *

The summer of Cello’s Bicentennial Disaster, I saw Aunt Gloria get into Uncle Ralston’s Cadillac behind the
Eagle
. She had on a very big wig and I saw a box of Kleenex go onto the dashboard. Out of nowhere Uncle Ralston gave her the back of his hand. When he had both hands back on the wheel, she was still leaning back against the seat, her hand over her mouth and nose. I could see the sequins of her nightclub-act dress. She reached for the Kleenex and Uncle Ralston backed up his car.

I went upstairs to tell Dad and on the way to his office I told three or four people what I had seen. They knew to run.

“Loose lips are torpedoes in your own waters.” Dad told me never to make Uncle Ralston’s business my business. I pointed out to him that he had. He said the trick was to let people think you had. He gave me the manly task of changing the bottle in the watercooler.

*   *   *

The year Cello got married on Lake Constance, I was mugged on my circuitous way back from class, in Greektown, of all places. My bag was taken, and with it my paper on eighteenth-century monument sculpture by Rysbrack. It was not “my” paper. I’d bought it for an outrageous sum. A few weeks later I dropped out of college for the second time. Drunk, I again called Cello long-distance in Berlin. She said that she wished she knew what to tell me. She said she was going to call Mom and hung up. She didn’t call Mom.

“Mooch,” Solomon said when I had to come home again.

“Minnie the Moocher, to you,” I answered.

“And a Big Zero.”

“Hot time hoochie-coochie, to you.”

“You are nothing.”

I began to sing “The Wreck of the Jedediah Goodfinch.”

I was on the floor, gasping, holding my stomach. My brother had rammed a fist into my gut and the fall had knocked the wind out of me. He taught me that to complete a victory an army will march through the night without rations.

Successful people, people good at life, can look ahead; they’ve been looking ahead all their lives, even at summer camp. They knew the next school year was coming and their bodies were getting ready for it, while yours was just goofing off and drinking sugar. People say live in the moment, but the moment was the only thing I was good at. I could make the moment last, stretch it out for days, years, my whole life.

*   *   *

“Married and moving house from one coast to the other. This is certainly something to toss around in the salad bowl of the mind,” Dad said in the kitchen. Mom sat. I looked at Solomon’s feet. The paramedics were gone. Mom began to cry.

*   *   *

Cello was sixteen when she moved in pretty much for good. Her siblings were ten and nine; my brother was thirteen. School was nuts; the country was on the brink. Mom’s Hyde Park white people were terrified, but they didn’t want to say so in front of her. I was about to be eleven and West Chicago was on TV and in flames. People were afraid to go anywhere. The mayor had given the cops shoot-to-kill orders.

Martin Luther King had been murdered, but it was open season on us, Dad said. Nobody was hiding anything from anybody. We watched television with the lights on in every room of the house. One of Mom’s crazies, an alcoholic seamstress, sat with us, crying. When Solomon opened our door to check out the square, Dad yanked him back inside.

It was mine, the fear that night, the kind of being afraid you get when your protectors are themselves frightened. The policemen weren’t lining up to protect marchers. They were killing black people left and right, we heard. These weren’t marchers. Dad was on the phone to the caretakers at the
Eagle
building, trying to find out what was happening over there. People called with reports of gunfire.

King’s assassination was the first big thing I remembered. Odell’s crew at the ChiChi talked about JFK’s assassination as the first or only time that they saw their fathers cry. But the night of King’s murder was the first and only time I saw Dad tempted to what I believe was racial violence. The caretakers from the
Eagle
stopped by. Mom and Dad argued. The guys outside honked. He wasn’t risking his person for principle; he was protecting family property. My father went out, into the looting and the Molotov cocktails and rumors of snipers.

A carload of black men in a big, late-model Buick, they got stopped, but not by the cops. By gang leaders, who said they had the situation in their territory under control. I listened from the stairs. Cello, Solomon, Mom’s crazy, and a priest who had dared to creep over sat up with Mom. Supposedly he was trapped with us because of the curfew. It was the first big thing I understood and didn’t want to: my Dad had been sent home.

The pictures of smoking rubble the next day were bewildering. I couldn’t believe that I had to go to school. We were not allowed to go anywhere else. The newspaper’s caretakers came all the way over to drive us the three blocks. They never told Cello and her brother and sister that their father made his wife, his parents, their janitor, and Mrs. Williams hide with him in their basement. Ralston Jr.’s obsession with air-raid shelters began that night. His own mother asked him to move out.