Ghost of a Flea (7 page)

About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out. This was in the early Nineties, and I was living, more adrift than usual, in a constant shuffle back and forth between furnished rooms and LaVerne’s. David had vanished, I thought for good, leaving behind a few moments’ silence on my answering machine. Putting in his own time (I imagined) walking back to dreary rooms and standing by windows. Watching the world pass by just out of reach, acceptance, participation, understanding.

We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? That’s another thing I must get away from.

Closer to home I passed a neighborhood grill and looked in to see a waiter who at first appeared to have been in a terrible accident, his arm a clutch of raw meat. But it was merely bacon he held, draped over the arm (much as in movies fancy waiters hold towels over their arms) preparatory to cooking.

Five or six blocks further along, a homeless man had deposited his jumble of bags beneath a tree in an empty lot and lay knees up among them as though reclining in a field of high grass or flowers. Person and possessions, man and baggage, were indistinguishable, equally still, equally serene, in perfect lack of expectation.

THING IS, I walked out of the building and the cops were standing there waiting for me

There was this sort of gate at the entryway, and I froze just outside it. The gate was cast iron and once had something written on it in art deco script, but now only two letters were left, an
L
and an
I
, spaced far apart.

“Don’t s’pose you live here,” one of them, the older one, said.

“Don’t rightly see how anyone could. Back home our barns’re better’n this shithole.”

I held both hands up in plain view.

“You been drinkin’, boy?”

I shook my head. Best, always, to say as little as possible. That was true back home, even more true here in the city. I’d been in New Orleans a year or so at the time, and was learning fast.

“Here to buy dope, then.”

“No sir.”

“Damn. You’re one polite nigger, ain’t you?”

They walked me over to the squad between them. I made to lean against it and spread my feet.

“No need for that,” the older one said. He smiled. The smile reminded me of alligator gars into whose mouths we’d jam sticks, then watch them sink and fight their way back to the surface and sink again till they died. “You been up to the third floor by any chance?”

I shook my head.

“You sure ’bout that.”

I nodded.

“’Cause there’s a man up there makes his living selling dope to kids. We don’t like that much.”

“No sir.”

“Maybe you don’t either.”

“No sir.”

“Maybe if we went up there right now we’d find he’s given up his former occupation.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, officer.”

“No … no, of course you wouldn’t.” A car sped by on the street. He followed it with his eyes, then looked back. “I haven’t seen you before, have I?”

“No sir.”

“New in town?”

“Right new, yes sir.”

“Got family here?”

“No sir.”

“Heading back home soon, then?”

“I ’spect so, yes sir.”

“So I won’t be seeing you again.”

I shook my head.

“Good.”

“You’re free to go,” the younger one said. “He’s free to go, right?”

“Free as he’s gonna git, anyway.” They had a good laugh over that.

“Thank you, officers. You take care now, you hear?” And I walked away.

Away from apartment 321, where Harry Soames lay fouling pale blue tile with his blood.

“What the fuck, let ’em kill each other off,” the younger cop said behind me.

Two months after I’d come down from Arkansas, I met Angie at a Burger King on Carrollton. You could get a dinner there, burger, fries, drink, for about two dollars. She didn’t have it. And though I didn’t have much more myself, I sprang for her meal. I wasn’t so hardened back then, I hadn’t seen a lot.

We lived together for six, seven weeks. Didn’t take me long to find out Angie was an addict. But long as she got her stuff, she was good. And slowly over those days and weeks, without giving it a name or thinking much about it, I was falling in love with her.

Then one night—I’d started doing collections, which tends to be nighttime work—I came home and found Angie stretched out on the couch. She looked perfectly at rest. Some detective show was on TV, light from the screen washing over her. She’d popped corn and the full bowl sat beside her on the coffee table, along with a full glass of lemonade. She was dead.

YEARS AGO, in one or another of my hospital stays, LaVerne brought me a crackly old recording of Negro poetry. She’d come across it, on a New York City label more often given to Southern field recordings or folk music by aged Trotskyites and scruffily dressed suburban youngsters, with the occasional klezmer, fado or polka disk thrown in for good measure, at a client’s home. Following my initial, instinctive repulsion, I’d fallen in thrall to those voices, to Langston Hughes’s “Night comes slowly, black like me” and the poem just before, which described a Southern lynching. That one in particular I listened to again and again, riding the tone arm as it rose and spun and fell, words and images spilling from the grooves; till finally the weight of it all, shoveled from the record’s trenches, settled onto me. In subsequent years, without ever intending to, I’d begun collecting such poems. They’d push in past my feet as I opened the door and not be put back out. Then one day, browsing a ramshackle antique store in the Faubourg Marigny, I swung open the top of an old school desk to find, atop a packet of letters tied with string, a postcard dated Jun 3 1931. The message, in glorious Palmer loops and dips, read
Geo. and family doing good. Yesterday we took ourselves out to these mounds that were bilt hundreds of yrs ago by no one knows who. Just these humps, like they’d done buried an elephant. Home soon. Yr wife, Dorothy
. Much of the ink had faded, until only the outline of letters, like dry husks, remained. I turned the postcard over. On its front, a young black man hung from one middling limb of a pecan tree. All the limbs went up at sharp angles, as though in a rush towards sky. The man hung there, an afterthought, trying to tug this single branch back down. The rope about his neck was obscenely thick, thick as a man’s arm. His feet were bare and so bloated with pooled blood that they looked like melons. Beneath him, in the tree’s shade, a group of whites sat looking into the camera with cups raised.

As I walked back up into the Quarter towards Canal, past flotillas of tourists, shop owners hosing down sidewalks, mule-drawn carriages and delivery vans that looked as though they’d sustained artillery attacks, things began coming together in heart and head at odd angles. Half a block from Jackson Square I wheeled about and went back, bought the postcard for five dollars. Two weeks later I proposed
Strange
Fruit, Strange Flowers
to my publisher. Had I written it, the book would have been an extended essay on the art and literature of lynching; it would have been also, leaving aside the unpublished autobiography, my only nonfiction book. It sold on prospectus the first time out to a major publisher for what my agent called “a respectable advance”—approximately what I’d made for all my novels to date combined. Then a long odyssey as editors came and went, book’s file staggering from desk to desk, carried home to Brooklyn on the F train, left behind at the Cheyenne Diner but recovered, correspondence outgrowing prospectus and contract like weeds taking over a vacant lot.

“I had no idea,” I’d say to Clare, weeks into the thing, “how difficult this would be, or how different. Writing a novel’s never easy. No way around putting in the time and sweat. And you never really know what you’re doing. There’s a stack of lumber and nails you’ve got to turn into walls somehow. Find a place for doorways, windows and sills and figure out some way to put them in. But for all that, it’s more like building a tree house, tacking on a porch.
This
is like remodeling your bathroom: walls a smelly map of mildew and stain, floors torn out, reeking, jagged pipes everywhere. And nothing fits anything else.”

Those first weeks and for some time after, as the book in its pod (I thought) grew a body, face, hands, I’d been a faithful carpenter. Turned up at local archives and libraries day after day with such regularity that the guards and I came to know one another. Sometimes I’d join them, bearing cups of carryout coffee, on the back steps before opening. Drink and chat a few minutes, then go inside and lay out legal pads, pens, PostIt notes, index cards, retrieve books held for me overnight under the counter, settle in at a table.

Once during an afternoon break I stood outside with a guard named Jean. Well past fifty, body unbowed and unslowed by time, features smooth as stone, he dismounted the bus each morning with shirt laundered and starched, trousers pressed to a crease that could slice butter. Half a block over, in the square before City Hall, long folding tables had been set up to feed the homeless and indigent. I looked from orderly queues awaiting allotments of stew, bread and applesauce, to the motel across the street where thirty-plus years ago a man named Terence Gully had clambered to the roof with a .44-caliber Magnum rifle, a duffel bag full of ammunition, and four generations of racial pain.

A man about the same age as my companion, wearing ancient khakis, Madras sportcoat and two or three shirts, all of them in tatters, walked across Poydras from downtown. With him was a girl of perhaps twelve, his daughter, perhaps, the two of them to every appearance living together on the streets. Each bore a backpack, blankets tied into bedrolls and swung under one arm. The girl’s clothes were as hodgepodge as his: oversize men’s jeans, sweatshirt from which cute pawin-paw kittens had long ago faded, grimy John Deere gimme cap. But as they came closer, I saw her face. Base and powder, liner and eye shadow, a touch of rouge, pale lipstick.

“Pretty girl. Got one ’bout that age myself,” Jean said beside me. He put out his cigarette on the sole of a steel-toed shoe, held it cradled in one hand for disposal. “Had, anyway. Wife up and left me two, three weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jean shrugged. “Prob’ly for the best.”

After he’d gone back in, I stood watching father and daughter inch along the line, plates slowly filling. I thought about parents and children, about David and Alouette, Terence Gully, the young man hanging from that pecan tree on the postcard. Had he had children? Not much more than a child himself. Another of America’s horde of invisible men. They pass through life a shadow, leaving no impression. Never in his life would that young black man have had occasion to be photographed. Or to have been entered in any record beyond statistics of birth and death. Now there he hung for all time.

What research taught me was that such postcards were once common. They’d existed by the hundreds, handed across counters like advertising circulars, stuffed into bags of flour and patent medicine, spread on hallway tables in rooming houses, propped up in shop windows. That fall I traveled to a small town in Pennsylvania whose university library had amassed a major collection, possibly the only collection, of these cards. I went through the lot, made copious notes and photocopies, had dinner, half a dozen weak drinks and lunch the next day with the collection’s curator. An elderly gentleman with pinkish hair and eyes, he spoke with authority and passion while seeming at the same time apologetic, even embarrassed, by his calling. Dressed in the first seersucker suit I’d seen outside New Orleans (though without the accompanying bow tie), he had the bearing, weather-beaten skin and accent of an Alabama laborer, and a Ph.D. from Princeton. Back home, I haunted Tulane’s Special Collections, the Amistad, Xavier.

For all my best intentions and time accrued, alas, that book soon went the way of others, left unfinished, never truly begun. Yet somehow poems still found their way to me. Days before I walked out on teaching, in the course of preparing a lecture on comic novelists, I’d come across one by Charles Henri Ford in a book on Peter De Vries.

That confusion, the near-gnostic fusion of two lives, tree and hanged person becoming one, seems to me perfect, as does the poem’s fine concluding image,
minutes like black cherries drop from my shady side.

Newly returned from my recon of Alouette’s workplace and bibliophilic dinner at Tender Buttons, I sat at the kitchen table in LaVerne’s old house thinking about David, with Ford’s poem, especially that last line, ticking in my head. Deborah had left a note on the refrigerator, in a space we’d agreed to keep clear of the archaeological litter of old messages, scrawled drawings, unpaid bills, clippings and photos that scaled the rest:
Casting tonight, may be late, VERY late, love you.
That had made me remember another note encountered years ago (
Home soon
) on a picture postcard. Then the poem.

Back when I was writing more or less regularly and able to delude myself I might more or less make a living at it, I’d always kept notepads within reach. Now I found one on a shelf beneath an alluvium of receipts and unopened mail, food coupons long expired, blotched handwritten recipes, turned-back sections from the
Times-Picayune
or
New York Times,
half a paperback copy of
Huckleberry Finn
, and a Loompanics catalog. When I slammed the pad’s edge against the table, dust, cat hair and dessicated insect parts fell away. Further down in the compost heap I found a skittery ballpoint.

Your faces turn up to me, those I know and those I’ll never know, there’s little difference. All your sad mouths and hungry eyes and wayward feet, all your stories waiting to be told. But who will tell them now? This gentle sun is high. It waits for me. Minutes like black cherries drop from my side.

Deborah came home well past midnight to find me still there at the table, sheaves of pages pushed to the back, against the wall. We talked awhile distractedly, she went up to bed, I brewed a pot of strong coffee, made sandwiches, and went on scribbling. Just after six that morning—by this time I’d moved out onto the porch—I heard her descending stairs, calling after me. Moments later, wrapped in a blanket, she came out. We sat together watching dawn spread its skirt above the trees.

“You’re writing again,” she said after a while.

“For the moment.”

“A book?”

“Could be.”

“That’s good, Lew.” She looked tired. “Kettle’s on for tea, if you want some. I could fix biscuits.”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

I nodded. “Up early, huh?”

“Still wired.”

We sat quietly. Lights came on in upstairs bedrooms, bathrooms and downstairs kitchens. Marcie waved as she got into her car and backed out of the driveway on her way to Baptist, where she worked critical care.

“How’d the casting go?”

“Good. Better than good, really. You forget how much talent there is. Most everything’s in place, I think.”

“Great.”

“I keep telling myself that. Trying to see around the elephant: that it’s only a start.”

Out in the kitchen, the kettle began whistling.

“This kid came in,” Deborah said. “He’s fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Shorts hanging down around his calves, shirt two or three sizes too large, unlaced British Knights. Hair like tumbleweed. No experience, no photo, no résumé. Walks in a slump, like he might collapse, boneless, any minute. God knows what got him there. Or what prompted me to give him a shot. But I told him I’d like him to read from one of the choruses. He looks at me and says okay. Picks the book up, looks at it once, and puts it down. Then he starts in. And I realize he’s got it, words, rhythm, the whole thing, just from that quick glance. But he’s not doing it straight. He’s jamming the part, spinning out this weird reggae/hip-hop thing from Aristophanes’ words. And it’s just right, incredibly right.

“I had chills, Lew. Everyone did.” She stood, shrugging the blanket up around her. “You particularly desperate for coffee or tea?”

“No.”

“Then the hell with it, I’m going back to bed. Join me?”

“I want to read through this first.”

I listened to her mount the stairs, heard the radio come on, toilet flush, water run into the sink. Looked at the pages I’d shuffled more or less into order.

A black man is about to be hung on the oak beneath which he played as a child, often as not with the children of white neighbors and overseers. Latterly he’s become a kind of minstrel, a guitarist and singer, a storyteller. He looks out at all these other faces and something suddenly fills him, something he doesn’t understand, can’t name, has never felt before. He begins telling jokes, riffing on his fate. The entire novel, 125 pages, takes place in the moments before he drops.

There are altogether too many explanations, Peter De Vries writes, too many systems. They cancel one another out, till only the
why
remains, the question mark we can’t rid ourselves of: that fishhook in the heart. Trying to understand, we cry Let there be light—and only the dawn breaks.

Researching, I’d found in Xavier’s archives the vestige of a black newspaper published around the turn of the century, documenting community life in a town whose black population essentially had been shipped north to serve white male college students. No record of who might have edited, written or printed the newspaper: all invisible men. Only this microfilm image of the front page survived. Stories were continued to inside pages that no longer exist.