Makeda (21 page)
I left my grandmother seated in the dark parlor and walked through to the vestibule. When I opened the front door to leave, so bright was the midday sun that I saw nothing at first except the featureless shape of a man standing there before me on the little wooden porch, motionless and silent. As my pupils adjusted, I saw that the man was my father. Discernible first were the weary eyes, rimmed with dessicated gray parchment skin. The eyes, a burning ruin of puzzled agony, shone wetly from deep sockets and conveyed a scourge of relentless melancholy. The shoulders sloped as if they had been borne down by the dead weight of harsh fortune.
He said only my name, “Gray,” wedging with one word the choking inhibition of pride hard against the warring coequal truths of love and fury.
I said, “Hello, Daddy.” Then he moved past me into the darkness of the house without saying anything more.
I did not return to the house until after dark that evening. Daddy had left for home hours before.
“Gray, I want you to promise me something.”
“Sure, Grandma.”
“Don’t give me
sure
, boy. I’m serious.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“I want you to promise me now.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Is this girl, this girl Jeanne, is she somethin’ you’re sure about?”
“Yes, Grandma. I’m just not so sure about
me
, you know?”
“Then you must do what you have to do to make things right, boy. Don’t fool around and lose her, you hear me?”
“Yes, Grandma. I hear you.”
“That means you have to do whatever it is you have to do to straighten things out with your father. He can’t do it. He just doesn’t have it in him. You’ll have to show him, son. He’s not a bad man. He’s a good man. He just can’t seem to find his way.”
“I’ll try, Grandma,” I answered uncertainly.
“I’ve been a better mother to you than I was to him. You’re stronger than he is. Help him, Gray. Help him find his way out. Do you understand what I’m asking you?”
“Yes, Grandma, but—”
“No buts. You do it!” She sounded afraid, and then continued, “My family is fallin’ apart and I can’t stop it. You know like nobody else will ever know what that means to somebody like me. Life is not worth living without family and mine is fallin’ apart. Oh God! Oh Osanobua! Oh Onyame! Oh Allah! Please help me. Help me, please.” She spoke these exhortations quietly, but with a tremulous robustness, as if she were warring against some defining weakness that characterized the dangerous new age that she neither liked nor understood. Then she began to weep. I moved by the side of her chair and knelt and put my arms around her and held her close to me.
“I’m with you, Grandma. I’ll always be with you, Grandma. Do you understand me? Do you know what I mean?”
Her sightless eyes shone in the evening light like polished stones. “Yes, son. I understand.”
We held on to each other for what felt a long while. Then she released me and for a moment seemed to see me.
“You go to that girl and you love her, hear me? And you marry her and you have children. And you let her and those children know your soul, and they will be safe because yours is a soul worth knowin’.”
I
did not attend the May commencement exercises. I told Jeanne that this was because I did not believe in the nonsense of pomp and ceremony. The truth was that I was ashamed of having no family to attend and I did not want Jeanne to witness this. I collected my master’s diploma from the president’s office on the following Monday and that was that.
I made calls on the same Monday to arrange a number of job interviews. Although I had already committed to begin work at the University of Pennsylvania toward a PhD in September, I had lately begun to think about working awhile first. Thus, I was seeking a college teaching position and was already under serious consideration by two English departments, one in western Maryland and another at Cheney State, a historically black school in Pennsylvania.
I then drove downtown to Blanton’s Books, a usedbook store with thousands of little-known titles. I bought a fairly recent softcover edition of a book that had been originally published in 1886:
The Story of the Moors in Spain
by the English writer Stanley Lane-Poole. The book’s cover design had been taken from a painting by Eduard Charlemont that belonged to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting was a full-length portrait of a bearded darkskinned black man dressed in an elaborately embroidered white silk robe and headdress. The artist had entitled the painting,
The Moorish Chief
.
When I got back to my apartment I called Mrs. Grier and asked her to get my grandmother to the phone.
“Grandma, I’m sending you a book about the Moorish civilization in Spain. Have Mrs. Grier over to read to you and don’t let her stop until you’ve gotten through, at least, the first 131 pages. Oh—and also ask her to describe the man on the cover. Ask her who the man looks like. Don’t tell her, just ask her, and I bet she says Daddy when he was young. Okay, Grandma?”
“Are you still coming home before you leave for Mali?”
I was glad to hear her ask this. “Yes, Grandma, I won’t leave without seeing you.”
Later that evening, I called Dr. Harris-Fulbright at home in Los Angeles and told her that my grandmother had decided against hypnosis, or even a meeting with her.
“Did you make clear to her the importance of this kind of research?” The question bore a tone of accusation.
“I did the best I could, Dr. Harris-Fulbright.”
“Did you explain to her that she would be credited in any writings about her experiences?”
“Yes. But she doesn’t want to be credited.”
“She doesn’t?” Incredulous.
“My grandmother sees the world differently from most people.”
Jeanne and I, by then, had been seeing each other exclusively for just under three months and had yet to make love. In the matter of sex, we were both old-fashioned in very much the same way. We had become quite serious about each other, and while our separate florid chemistries gathered pace for release, we mutually understood that because of the serious character of our relationship, ill-timed sex would alter it irrevocably. Intuition told her that I needed healing first, thus making the closed, shrouded piece of my story all the more concerning to her. Generously she had decided to wait on me. Waiting was but another thing that she did well. She understood me, even the bruised, hidden parts of me she had yet been given leave to know. She was possessed of some intrinsic faith that I would survive whatever it was that was troubling me. Indeed, it was her faith, not mine, that gave me to believe that she may have been right.
I fantasized a great deal about having sex with Jeanne. Yet I was reluctant to press my case for it.
In early adulthood, I found my parents’ teachings attacking me with surprising force in the literal verse of their very own brittle biblical morality on sex that makes the whole business of the dance so exciting on the one hand and so wrong on the other, both of which hands needed to applaud God’s greatest gift to humankind, far and away.
Society had instructed me that sex was a bad thing to do, but not nearly as bad for guys as it was for the girls we begged to do
it
with us. While sex soiled us maybe a little, it soiled girls a lot. Although I am sure my parents never gave it much thought, they contributed significantly to our acceptance of this notorious double standard. I saw the relief and approval very much written on my mother’s face as she worked hard to scold me after one of my condoms surfaced in the suds of her weekly clothes wash. Her son was safely heterosexual. I’m sure she told Daddy about the washtub rubber that very night. I’m just as sure that Daddy breathed a sigh of relief and crossed one of the bigger items from his long worry list.
It was that evening as we watched the sun set from her apartment balcony that I told Jeanne the story of my grandmother, Makeda Gee Florida Harris March, and her Homeric dream travels across the arc of time.
My mother called me on a Monday morning after my father left the house for work. It was not my birthday. It was not Christmas.
My mother was fifty-two years old. She had once been a brilliant and beautiful young woman of formidable promise. But the years and terrible times, and indeed the men— her sons, her husband—in her life as well, had worn away all the colors of hope in her character, leaving in its gray open space only the dull daily mindless repetitions of the dutiful housebound wife and mother. She had submerged her once creative specialness and sacrificed herself all but wholly to the decorated shrine of my father’s embattled ego. She had once loved him fiercely. But her ardor, like the rest of her unnoticed passions, had cooled over the years in its ritual mold. She knew that my father loved her. She also knew that he worshipped his mother, the woman who had given him everything with which he had scratched his way to manhood. Thus, my mother had no real grounded place in the world, except that of serving the men in her house, and doing so for neither glory nor praise. She, in truth, lived, or existed, between us, ever mediating, ever seeking a peace that was inherently unachievable.
“Virgil, you know how your father feels about your grandmother. He goes there every day. He worries about her constantly.” I had no idea where she was going with this and thus elected to remain quiet. “He was there on the Saturday after you were there. With your father sitting there, your grandmother received a phone call from a professor in California that got her very upset. Your father said that your grandmother told the professor repeatedly, and then nearly shouted at the person, that she would not let the professor hypnotize her. Then your grandmother hung up on the woman. Your father got your grandmother to tell him the whole story about the professor and the strange dreams your grandmother’s been having. Your father asked your grandmother how a professor in California would know about his mother’s dreams, and your grandmother told your father that
you
had called the professor and told her all these things about your grandmother. Your father is beside himself with anger. He says that you’re making his mother look like a lunatic.”
Families reach a point where almost nothing can be explained rationally within them, where words are used but language is not formed and all reason is abandoned to the ghosts of forgotten wrong turns and fossilized hurts and misconstrued purposes.
I did not know what to say to my mother. Nothing I could say would have mattered to her, for it was I who’d have been doing the saying.
When I said nothing, my mother misinterpreted my silence and became uncharacteristically angry.
“If you have nothing to say for yourself, Virgil, just stop it, will you! Just stop whatever it is that you have been doing! Just stop it, do you hear me, boy? Just, just stop it!” Then she hung up.
T
he night following my grandmother’s unpleasant telephone exchange with Dr. Harris-Fulbright, Mrs. Grier was startled awake at three in the morning by a loud crashing thud that shook the bedroom wall she and Mr. Grier shared with my grandmother, their next door neighbor. Mrs. Grier woke her deep-sleeping husband at almost the very moment the second crash arrived. She was frightened and urged her burly husband, a small building contractor, to call the police. Mr. Grier demurred, saying that he would handle the matter. He then took from the top drawer of their bedroom bureau a five-shot thirty-eight-caliber nickel-plated Rossi revolver he kept beneath his pillow. He told his wife to get the front door key to my grandmother’s house that my father had entrusted to her for just such “suspicious occasions.”
Mr. and Mrs. Grier opened the door and came immediately upon a darkened stair that was only lighted dimly by the yellowy sodium wash of a streetlamp.
Leading his wife by a good measure, Mr. Grier felt his way up the stairs of my grandmother’s house just as the third crash arrived, followed by the sound of shattering glass. Mr. Grier turned at the top of the stairs and instructed his wife with authority to remain in the vestibule. With his gun drawn, Mr. Grier crept down the long black second-floor hallway toward the open door of my grandmother’s bedroom where a glimmer from the streetlamp shone faintly upon a writhing figure that lay mummified in tangled bedding on the mattress of a mountainous mahogany bedstead standing fast against the common wall. With eyes that by then had adjusted to the dark, Mr. Grier noticed an end table that had been knocked over and a lamp that had once rested on it, in shards on the floor. On the bed, a lone figure’s head lolled ensnared in a white bedspread that muffled screams of the most desperate sort. Though most of what he heard was unintelligible to him, he knew the figure to be screaming for help.
“Oh God! Osanobua! Somebody help me, please! Get away! G-get, get away from me!” All of this muffled, as the head appeared to be smothering itself in the twisted bedding while the bare legs kicked violently at some imaginary assailant from which the legs at the same time churned furiously to escape. Then the thrashing, entombed figure found purchase with its kicking feet and wheeled over the edge of the bed, landing in a heap on the shards of the shattered lamp, all the while screaming for help through the bedspread that had been sucked by then well into the figure’s gaping mouth. “My baby! My baby! Oh God, please, not my baby!”
Mr. Grier recognized the top of my grandmother’s snow-white head and called to his wife for help. As Mrs. Grier climbed the dark stairs, Mr. Grier drew closer to the flailing frenzied mass on the floor without knowing quite what to do.
Mrs. Grier then appeared in the doorway. “Oh my God, Makeda! What has happened to you?” She ran to my grandmother, threw herself upon the glass-strewn floor, tore away the bedding that was soaked with sweat and blood, and wrenched my struggling grandmother into her soft strong arms. My grandmother, bathed in sweat, awoke disoriented and in pain from a contusion on the shoulder that had struck the floor first and a badly lacerated lower calf and thigh.