Makeda (14 page)
In the introduction, Dr. Harris-Fulbright gave a definition of reincarnation (
the transmigration of a soul from a dying
body to a living body
) and listed religions and prominent people who either embraced reincarnation as a tenet of pietistic faith or as a simple nonreligious personal belief.
Among those who embraced a belief in reincarnation through their religions were the Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs of India, the Theravada Buddhists of Burma, the Theravada Buddhists of Thailand, the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, the Igbo of Nigeria, the Haida and Tlingit of Alaska, the Alevis of Turkey, the Druze of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, the Buddhists of Tibet. It seemed a simpler and less taxing matter to list the world religions that did
not
embrace reincarnation (Christianity and Islam) than to delineate the much larger list of religions and cultures that did, a preponderance of faiths that may have prompted the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to remark that, “The best definition of Europe is that it is the part of the world that does not believe in reincarnation.” But even in England, a
Sunday Telegraph
poll had shown that 28 percent of British adults believed in reincarnation, putting them on a believers list that included Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, General George Patton, Virgil, Plato, and the ancient Egyptians who believed in reincarnation long before the establishment of Buddhism and Hinduism.
I weighed for a while what I had read. I tried, as always, without succeeding, to understand how people were able to girdle themselves with “beliefs” which were based upon little more than “faith” which was based circularly upon “beliefs” unsupported by any compelling remembered personal experience. Having never experienced either, try as I might, I was not able to understand how one could manage to
believe
in heaven or hell, either, as an eventual destination, or as an unending postlife condition. Thus, while I did not believe in reincarnation, with equal conviction I did not
not
believe in reincarnation. And I was not, in the least, uncomfortable about not knowing things that were inherently
un
knowable. Nor would I have believed the stories of people who were said to have testified to having remembered past lives any more than I believed that Oral Roberts was really healing people on television in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But I
believed
my grandmother.
What’s more, I
knew
that she had described to me things she could not have learned or known about within the very real mortal small realm of her life as a blind hand laundress living on Duvall Street in Richmond, Virginia.
She
knew
things about the heavens well before the scientific community even suspected them. She also
knew
things that even now cannot be conventionally explained. She
knew
that the Dogon people (of whom she had never heard) knew for at least 600 years about the orbit path of an unseeable star, and the general behavior of the stars and planets of the stellar world. How could the Dogon have known these things? How could my grandmother have known about the Dogon, or what they had known about for so long before everybody else?
My grandmother believed that she learned this from her Dogon father in a life that she was living in Mali in the year 1394, 149 years before the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus hypothesized in
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
that the earth revolved around the sun.
The jacket notes said that Dr. Harris-Fulbright had investigated (presumably through the use of face-to-face interviews and story-matching historical research) more than 1,000 claims of remembered past lives, some of which were recalled via hypnotic regression and others that were remembered in dreams. The bulk of the book was devoted to case studies of claims investigated by her and others.
One such case, for instance, was the story of Laurel Dilmen (pseudonym) who was born in Chicago during the Depression years. Under hypnosis, Dilmen claimed to remember several past lives, one of which was the life of Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado who was born November 15, 1555 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The daughter of a Spanish officer and a German mother, Antonia’s travels took her from Hispaniola to Germany, from Germany to England, from England to Spain during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
While most hypnotic regressions produce recollections of a nebulous quality, the story Antonia (Dilmen) told to her hypnotist, Dr. Linda Tarazi, in thirty-six sessions over a two-year period was replete with the names, venues, events, and dates of the most obscure small-town transpirations. For example, Antonia (Dilmen) said that from 1584 to 1588 there were two, not the usual three, inquisitors for the town of Cuenca where she lived. She went on to name the two. When Dr. Tarazi headed to Cuenca to check this in the town’s Episcopal archives, she discovered that Antonia (Dilmen) had been right, as was the case with every other trivial particular she had described, some of which were confirmable only from rare books in specialized Spanish libraries.
Dr. Harris-Fulbright concluded that Antonia’s (Dilmen’s) story was entirely too complex and detailed for her to have fashioned it out of whole cloth. In any case, why would she have done such, even had she the time, which did not appear to be the case? Dilmen was not seeking to sell her story, nor was she seeking publicity. Dr. Tarazi, who’d spent years verifying Antonia’s (Dilmen’s) story, in time came to believe it, and so in turn did Dr. Harris-Fulbright who presented the case in her book along with ten others she thought stood up under rigorous investigation.
I spent an hour taking down notes about the past life claims described in the book. I decided that I would try to reach Dr. Harris-Fulbright, either through her publisher or by telephone. The library kept in the reference section of the reading room a telephone directory for every major American city. I looked in the Los Angeles directory and found a listing for a Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright on Mulholland Drive.
T
he Poinciana was located on a narrow elegant side street that led downhill toward the Baltimore harbor. The name of the upscale restaurant was painted on a façade in sweeping cursive characters of gilt superimposed upon a silhouette of a stylized trunk branching beneath the orange-red crown of a tropical Poinciana tree.
The restaurant’s interior was compartmentalized tastefully into curving smoky-rose velour-upholstered booths and bench seats that softened voices and provided patrons the illusion of expensive privacy. The high-back booths were spaced and positioned by teak consoles that separated the dining parties and supported the exquisite African art that rested upon them in bottom-lit acrylic display cases. The warm indirect cove lighting was enhanced by old-style brass picture lights that illuminated the wallmounted sepia daguerreotypes of well-dressed period Jamaicans and the etched-glass hurricane candles that rested on cream tablecloths in solid brass seats.
Jeanne had made the reservation for seven o’clock. I arrived fifteen minutes early and was seated by a maître d’ dressed in a well-cut tuxedo. The retreating maître d’s footfalls were quieted by sculpted carpeting marked with a muted exotic pattern I guessed to be of Far Eastern origin.
I had never been in such a restaurant before and feared that I could not afford it. The place had the feel of an art lover’s home, a home in which the art was but an augmentation for the owner’s family, and otherwise, though beautiful, without important value. I lived in a small apartment that was completely devoid of memento and ornament. I distinctly remember being struck by the contrast between my apartment and the restaurant which felt like an understated celebration, not of the art, of course, but of the lives of those who thought it somehow important to place the art there—in the company of someone’s proudly posed forebears watching down from the walls.
I thought it was an arrestingly beautiful room—even as it awoke in me a feeling of mild despondency.
I saw Jeanne, tall and regal, speak to the maître d’ at his podium which was bathed by a small yellow light directed low upon a reservation book. She smiled at the man familiarly. He returned her smile and began to lead her toward my table.
She walked with the long effortless stride of unassuming grace. It was as if she possessed, along with her more obvious gifts, a certain
savoir faire
of motor skills that allowed her to execute even the smallest movements with balletic originality. The gliding vision of her in long raw silk slacks and a white raw silk long-sleeved blouse created an illusion of elegant weightlessness. It was as if her secrets, unlike mine, were not ballasted with ugly experiences: those which influence even the least important of mannerisms, the eyes within the smile, the timbre of the voice, the uninformed and reflexive estimates one makes of both the intended and accidental new acquaintance. I was badly wounded and knew it, although I’d never confessed this to a living soul. I wore the manners of education like a bandage to hide an old sore that never seemed to heal.
Though I knew I had been comparing my insides to her outsides, it seemed, still, that little had marred her while so much had marred me. We had only talked about “race” enough for me to know that the subject was important to her, that
it
had happened to her as it had to us all, and that she had not rationalized it into an infected boil of self-hate, or at least nothing outside the ordinary. She had given every outward appearance of being generally unscathed. Of course, the experience of
race
is peculiarly different for each of us. Everything in my experience instructed me to believe that the world’s nonblack people viewed blacks as little more than convenient postslavery devices to be placed between themselves and the bottom of global society. Having all of her life been afforded the armament of privilege, it was not likely that Jeanne’s view of the world would be as sharply dismal as mine.
But it was not important to me that we agree on such things. It was only important that we both see ourselves as living in the world of ideas and, hopefully, in neighborhoods of view, not unsustainably distant from each other’s. I was reasonably confident that her development had not been hindered by the privilege that seemed to have at least half-protected her. Indeed, the greater danger was that
my
development had been hobbled by the retrograde resentment I harbored toward those who possessed the privilege I had been made to muddle through without. Alongside infatuation, I felt a measure of this resentment toward Jeanne as well.
I rose to greet her. She smiled and offered a cheek to be kissed and then the other. I sat across from her and drank her in. Looking at her made me nervous, but she seemed not to be aware of this.
I may have overreported here my speculation about how her thoughts ran on the issue of race, but this was only a measure of how large she loomed, early on, in my regard. I hadn’t, before, much cared what the women I had known thought, or even, for that matter, whether they thought about anything much at all. I cared, however, very much about what Jeanne thought. I cared even when I couldn’t be sure that the caring was not largely stimulated by the curve of her neck, or the sculpture of her jaw, or the wedding of her features.
“I hope I wasn’t late,” she said.
“No. You weren’t late. I got here a few minutes early.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No. Never. It’s a beautiful place. Who owns it?”
“An old family friend of ours. He’s Jamaican. His name is Teofolo Hinton. He’s about forty. Came to the U.S. fifteen years ago after he finished a degree at Cambridge University to go to Columbia Law School.”
“Where did he get those?”
“Oh, the metal-plate portraits? They’re all members of his family. The Hintons have been prominent in Jamaica since the end of slavery. Teo’s the only person I know with a collection of family pictures like these.”
“That one looks newer.”
“It’s the only one that’s not copper-plate.” It was a picture of a tall man in cricket whites standing beside a shorter man in a suit.
“The tall man is Teo’s grandfather, Hector Hinton. He was a star bowler on the national team during the 1950s. The other man is Chief Minister Manley.”
“I’ve heard of him. But he’s not prime minister yet, is he?”
“You’re thinking of Michael Manley, his son. The man in the picture is Norman Manley. He left office eight years ago.”
We were drinking a dry white wine and talking easily. We hadn’t yet looked at our menus.
A man with a Jamaican accent approached and offered to take our order.
“What do you recommend?” I asked Jeanne.
“Do you like crab cakes?”
“Very much.”
“Well, these are special.”
I ordered the West Indian curried crab cake with Madras curry; Jeanne, the coriander-dusted scallops.
It developed that I had no need to draw upon my preparations and rehearsals. There was periodic quiet, not dead quiet, but quiet mutually legible as lightly charged, binding us where language would only have cluttered.
As I knew next to nothing about the arcana of international economics, we talked about topics in the mainstream, where and how we had grown up, the civil rights movement, our common interest in literature, world events, Vietnam, my deferment, her immediate future and mine.
She asked if I wished to teach and I told her no, that I thought not, but that I wanted very much to try writing, to which she said, well give it a go, for regret is the saddest and most pathetic of all emotions, and then I knew that I knew her as well as anyone could know anyone in an hour.
“I’m trying to write something now.”
“Your thesis on black poets?”
“No, something else.”
“What about?”
“Have you ever heard the name Makeda?”
“Yes. It’s an African name, isn’t it? It’s pretty. I like it.
Why did you ask?”
Stumbling a bit, “I’m not sure. I …”
For the first time in my life, I wanted very much to tell someone about my grandmother, the über-remarkable channeler I loved more than anyone on Earth. All at once, with an all but irresistible urgency, it seemed important that I tell Jeanne about my grandmother and her Dogon pre-Columbian knowledge of the heavens. But my grandmother had asked me to tell no one for fear that she would be held up to public ridicule. After all, who would believe, in the prevailing social climate of America, that Africans had understood such things centuries before the invention of the telescope? Before Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the solar system? And, further, since my offer of proof would amount to nothing more than a dream had by a colored, blind laundress living in Richmond, Virginia, who would believe Grandma’s story?