Makeda (12 page)
Three days after I posted the letter, my grandmother telephoned me from Mrs. Grier’s house. She sounded guarded.
“Gray?”
“Grandma?”
“Yes.”
“You got my letter. You let Mrs. Grier read it? All of it?”
“Yes. Well, when you write me a letter, I know it must be very important.”
“I’m sorry, Grandma. I knew I shouldn’t have put the dream business in a letter, but what I found out was so unbelievable that I guess I didn’t use the best judgment.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, son. Mrs. Grier couldn’t make any sense of it. If anything, it’s you she thinks might be a little bit fruity, not me.”
“I still have the drawing and my notes stashed away in that plastic sleeve. The rest of the information I’ve gathered fills up two drawers in my file cabinet.”
“I trust you’ll know what to do with it. You’re a grown man now and out in the big world, a bigger world than I ever had a chance to learn much of anything about.”
I thought about what she said and how cosmically far it was from the truth. “Grandma?”
“Yes, Gray.”
“Remember when I told you I wanted to be a writer?”
“I remember very clearly.”
“I was just saying words then.”
“Oh, I knew that, but even then you said those words for a reason, Gray. Some people’s puzzles have more pieces than other people’s puzzles. The people with a lot of pieces have to worker harder and longer to put the picture together than ordinary people with a piece or two, but in the long run, when they stick it out, they make the best pictures. You’re one of those people, Gray.”
“You really think so, Grandma?”
“I know so, son.”
“That’s part of what I need to talk to you about when I come down. Something I want to write about.”
“Something’s wrong, son … ?”
“Well, I think you know … ?”
“Your letter worried me.”
“I worry about myself.” I pulled myself erect in the chair in which I had slouched. “I’m sorry I missed your birthday party. How was it?”
“Oh, everybody came. Alma baked a cake. Mrs. Grier helped out. She’s got a good heart, you know. I think everyone had a good time.”
“D-does Daddy still come by every day?”
“Yes, son.”
“Does he know we talk?”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t the courage to inquire further and we fell silent for a while. Then she said, “I’ve had another dream.”
“About the Dogon?”
“No, somethin’ different.”
“Tell me.”
“Let it sit until you come.”
T
he month of March seems invariably to promise more than it delivers, teasing spring, frustrating hope’s impatience.
An unseasonal light snow was in the morning forecast for Baltimore. The low skull-gray sky choked on angry dark clouds that scudded before swirling winds beneath a thick overcast ceiling.
I did not look forward to the day, much of which I would spend in the library polishing the thesis draft I had entitled “A Critical Appraisal of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.” At three o’clock I was scheduled to meet with my thesis advisor, Dr. Harold Waters, who was chairman of the English department and a black conservative of the bow tie genus whom I had taken unkindly to calling in my angered head a
chestycrat
, my name for the self-important vainglorious sorts. Dr. Waters, I suppose, was not a bad sort really. It was just that I had corrupting my personal assessments a sharp and indigestible shard of glass in my craw that I could neither expel nor frontally acknowledge. The disability did not affect the social manners that were well-taught to me early on. Nor was I outwardly unpleasant to acquaintances that inconsequentially slid past as I moved, day in and day out, from where I was coming to where I was going. People were seen by me, firstly and safely, as solid obstacles not to be collided with. Quite literally so, and however sadly, little more.
No girl had ever seized my attention like Jeanne Burgess. Notwithstanding my low emotional state, I have to confess that the mere nearness of her exhilarated me beyond reason. To leave it said only that she was beautiful would be, I think, unforgivably banal. Indeed she
was
beautiful, but I only use, first, this term to explain my attraction to her because it was the easiest and simplest, though most inadequate, thing to say about her. The problem here is that I find the whole business of diagnosing romantic appeal to be witheringly abstract and undoable. The truth is that the entire matter of physical appeal is so inherently subjective that to describe what I really found irresistibly compelling about Jeanne would sound silly when said aloud. The small Haitian accent, for instance, and the colorful way it inflected her near visual use of language. The soft susurrus melody of her name when rightly pronounced—
Sh-jen
— educed the tender sensation of art wedded by mystery. The long, sweet flowing line of her neck and spine. The deep, low glow of her dark brown skin. And something more that may have been appreciated only by me. Something subtle and indescribable that she did with her head when she smiled. This little otherwise insignificantly shy something, whatever it was, would cause me to vibrate slightly.
Before I even
knew
. Such, I suppose, is the power and insanity of romantic attraction. Whenever I could look at her, I quite helplessly could not
not
look at her. And indeed, I may have been the only man to have seen her who’d been so completely smitten by her—or at least superficially so.
I realize (merely intellectually, of course) that these powerful surface charms of hers—the language, the liquid line of her form, the flawless skin, that head thing—were but elements of her own particular opposite-sex ignition system, much like the small delicate pieces of kindling that burn easy, fast, and hot to light the real blaze that burns for the long haul.
But as I was saying, she was, all the while, pretty, much as my mother had once been. However, I did not know enough further about her or my mother, for that matter, to compare the two of them very much beyond that. This sounds, I know, a terrible thing to confess. Nonetheless, my guess is that it is not, in the least, unusual. Parents of my mother’s generation hid themselves from their children behind walls of parental propriety that had been taught to them just as, I suppose, it has been taught to me.
As such, I didn’t know who my parents really were, and likely less still about the geography of their relationship, which appeared on the surface more decorous and habitual than anything that could possibly be identified as passionate. For instance, I never saw them playing, which, I suspect, means something.
I did want to
know
Jeanne, perhaps even to love her, but I was reflexively cautious. I would, in any case, have to
know
her first, and one cannot decide at the outset whether such is even possible. At best,
knowing
travels a long twisting road with ruts and bumps whose end cannot be seen from the dull safe start. But had I not endured enough? Why go to all the trouble to expose nerves believed cauterized?
Yet the urges that I felt were likely lymphatic by nature and did not fall, so much as one might have thought, within the discretions of a rational mind to control or direct.
She was such an exquisite vision, both of flesh and of spirit, which I must have known myself, by then, lost to investigate, shoals be damned. Already she had taken over a large space in my consciousness. Though hardly perceptible, I thought I may have started, even, walking differently.
My upbringing had been passably pleasant, or at least sufficiently so for me to have seen all of those associated with it as
standard
people, their attitudes, values, beliefs, social practices, and even their fatuities as
majority normal
.
Gordon and I never slept over at friends’ houses or ate at their tables. The March family was a self-contained and socially insular idea. Should I have thought about it at all, I’d have thought that we were like everybody else, or, upon reflection, that everybody else was like we were. My mother and father never went anywhere together, except to church or to errand-run.
There were no dances, restaurants (most of which were, in any case, for whites only), movies, vacations, or family excursions of any kind that I can remember. My mother and father just worked, she in our tidy house and he at his machine-gray metal desk borne under by tables and policies, tables for death and policies for life: term life, whole life, his life, Mama’s life, Grandma’s life, and anybody else’s life that his company, Bradford Life Insurance, was willing to place a bet on.
Their tedious daily routines passed unexamined, even by them. Never once had I heard them speak in a language of abstraction, in that upper breathing space, material and metaphysical, afforded by higher education itself and the creature comforts that it buys. (This was so, even though my mother had finished college). They talked about the state of our health. Never about the tone of our lives and the race-nasty boxed-over society that had foreordained it.
This was all
normal
to me, even satisfactory in a numbing sort of way.
I had found sex when I was sixteen with a girl whose mother worked afternoons typing until six. Her name was Geraldine Trice. She introduced me in the soft comfort of her mother’s detached white clapboard house to Dakota Staton, Duke Ellington, and premature ejaculation. Started her
life
at thirteen. Guys, been there, loved it, labeled her
loose
. Taught me. “How long have you had this thing in your wallet, Gray? No. No. Not like that, Gray. You roll it on like this. Slow now. Slow, Gray. You like that? Does it feel good? Oh, boy. Don’t worry. That always happens the first time.”
I liked Geraldine Trice. Never called her
loose
to anyone. Never bragged about
it
to the guys. Never told a soul. She was my friend. But, in sated retrospect, she was not someone I would ever have considered suitable for marrying. No, never to marry. Not
that
kind.
Nice
girls were for marrying. Geraldine was nice but not
nice
, although, I thought even then, she was only looking for love like the rest of us, love that just happened not to live in her house. Father gone. Mother busy. But that was something I couldn’t help her with. My life stretched out ahead of me. I had to move on. Back then, I could, she couldn’t—even though my secretions had mixed luxuriously on even and democratic terms with hers.
I was attracted to Jeanne Burgess in a completely different way, or to put it more accurately, in a much broader, more complicated way. For this, I had only my mother to use as a model. My mother was my
normal
. But Jeanne Burgess was nothing at all like my mother.
At times like that I wished that I’d had a sister, for I knew next to nothing about the female temperament and I had been told that boys growing up learned a lot about the thinking of girls by listening to their sisters talk to their mothers about boys. In thin rationalization, I reasoned that Geraldine Trice might have benefited from a brother figure that my very nonbrother new male animal chemistry had not allowed me to serve as. In any case, the small guilt that I felt was softened by the mitigating relief of knowing that it was she who had taken my virginity, not I hers. With a mostly clear conscience, it was that for which I have always been deeply grateful to Geraldine Trice.
While I was physically attracted to Jeanne Burgess, her beauty may have been the least of why she took such stubborn root in my thoughts, crowding against the demons that had been in residence there since high school.
I said earlier that she was nothing like my mother. That may have been too strong. I did not really know my mother, a formerly smart woman out of whom male society had domesticated any instinct she must have had to hold forth helpfully on the larger public issues of her time. Over the dreary downward pull of time, she had been reduced to coupon clipping, housekeeping, and vicarious ambition for her sons. Loving her all the while, my father, devolving all of his hope upon Gordon and, less so, upon me, never understood the drab common fate (which I suspected took the place of “love” in their marriage) to which they had been consigned by the era’s circumstance.
While I wanted to believe that I was very much unlike my parents, I was constrained to concede that I was more than biologically
of
them as well. This, added to the baggage I bore like a broken porter, caused me to question the wisdom of
knowing
a woman as forthrightly brilliant and self-possessed as Jeanne Burgess.
Jeanne, younger than I by two years, had earned her PhD in economics the year before from Oxford University with highest honors, the first black to do so. Her father, Dennis Burgess, was a Chicago neurosurgeon and her mother, Marie Cesaire-Burgess, a celebrated playwright and daughter of the great Haitian painter Montas Cesaire.
Jeanne was confident and pleasantly self-assured in the congenitally unaffected way of the privileged that attracted and unnerved me at the same time. She was doing a year of postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University downtown. I had been introduced to her three weeks before at a Haitian art show running at a gallery near the Inner Harbor that had featured three of her grandfather’s paintings. We had found ourselves standing alone before a painting entitled
Eve au Paradis
by Salnave Philippe-Auguste. At the center of the painting was a black Eve reaching for an apple amidst the luxuriant green lushness of Eden. Depicted in bold primary colors were two giraffes, a lion, a tiger, a zebra, an elephant, exotic birds, and a watching venomous tree serpent coiled inches from the apple that was all but within Eve’s grasp.