Makeda (32 page)
“Yes, it does, and thanks for all your trouble.”
“No trouble at all. I’ll see you next week then?”
“I’ll be at your office next Thursday at one.”
The following week, Dr. Quarles and I would have an hour-long talk in his campus office covering every important detail of my trip to Mali save, of course, any reference to my grandmother’s dreams that had inspired the journey.
At the end of our meeting, Dr. Quarles, his features troubled by the unique isolation of the well-meaning but powerless learned, interlaced his fingers behind his head and vented a long and uncharacteristic sigh. “I have been fascinated for some time by Mali’s long, storied history.” He stopped his train of thought and looked vacantly into the ceiling, mulling something that appeared to disturb him. “I should have made some of it required reading for my students.” Then, almost to himself he said tiredly, “So much we Negroes really ought to know about ourselves, we—God help us—well, Graylon, did you know that the Mali empire introduced a written governing constitution at a place called Kurukan Fuga in the year 1235 providing human rights to a population that covered a territory in West Africa the size of Western Europe? Kurukan Fuga is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site …”
It was still another in an ever-growing list of things I thought I should have known about but didn’t.
“… and the French go on so incessantly about their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. You’d have thought that they were the first in the world to think about such things … I don’t know, Graylon. I just don’t know … the very French that colonized and enslaved Malians.”
O
n August 25, 1970, Aunt Clarice died at home little more than two months following my return from Mali. She died alone in the early evening in the kitchen of a small rented frame shotgun house that backed onto a rail spur running along the northern industrial outskirts of the city.
On the death certificate, the Richmond city coroner’s office listed the cause of death as “heart failure.”
She was seventy-eight.
She had been dead for two days before her body was discovered by an overzealous water bill collector who, after receiving no response to his knock on the front door, went around to the rear of the dilapidated house, spotted through the kitchen window Aunt Clarice’s motionless body on the floor, and called the police. The two white Richmond police patrolmen, upon arriving on the scene, concluded that Aunt Clarice, while collapsing, had pulled from the kitchen wall the large round clock that rested shattered on the linoleum-covered floor beside her body. From the stilled clock’s hands, the two officers further concluded in a cursorily written police report that Aunt Clarice had died at 7:21 p.m., roughly the same time a twenty-six-car freight train was passing noisily behind her kitchen.
Aunt Clarice did not belong to a church and had no friends that we knew of. She had been retired from her job as a charwoman for thirteen years and lived on a tiny pension. During her life, her name only appeared in a newspaper once, that coming after a white reporter, interviewing sidewalk passersby for his paper’s morning edition, asked her whether or not she supported the city’s Negro civil rights leaders who had organized a surprisingly effective boycott of Thalhimers and Miller and Rhoads, two whiteowned downtown department stores that were operating segregated lunch counters.
Aunt Clarice said to the reporter, “I do not.”
Her comment appeared in the newspaper the following morning causing considerable embarrassment to the few blood relations she had left in the world.
Following her death, the
Afro-American,
in a brief death notice, reprised the comment and listed Clarice Miller’s two surviving blood relations:
a nephew, David March, and
a great nephew, Graylon March
. The notice said further that Aunt Clarice had completed the fifth grade at the Navy Hill School and had worked during her life as an office cleaner.
To her family’s surprise, Aunt Clarice, six months to a day before her death, had prepared and dated a handwritten will that was found by my mother, who’d taken on the responsibility of gathering from my aunt’s living quarters the few worldly goods she’d left behind. The will had been discovered in the kitchen rolled up and buried in a tin of tea bags. In the will, Aunt Clarice bequeathed to my father, her closest living relation, a death benefit of $2,000 payable from a small term-life policy issued by the Big Stone Life Insurance Company, a white company, with offices throughout the southeastern United States. Early in my father’s insurance career, he had tried without success to sell Aunt Clarice a Bradford Life Insurance Company policy. She had turned him down explaining that Bradford was “owned by Negroes who would take my hard-earned money and keep it.”
My father never received any money from Big Stone and paid from his own near-empty pocket for Aunt Clarice’s burial expenses in twelve payments spread out over a year. Big Stone’s agent, who over the years had collected small weekly premium payments in cash from Aunt Clarice at her front door, defended his company’s refusal to pay the death benefit by explaining to my father that “the woman” had missed a payment resulting in the voiding of her policy. Because the premiums had always been paid in cash, my father was unable to challenge Big Stone’s decision to deny payment of the benefit.
Grandma called me from Mrs. Grier’s house and asked that I drive down from Baltimore with Jeanne to attend the funeral services which were to be held in the small nondenominational chapel room of the Bivens Funeral Home on Leigh Street.
I did not want to come but felt that I had little choice. My grandmother had requested my presence and that was that. On both my mother and father’s sides, we were a very small family, and never is such felt more strikingly than in death. It would, nonetheless, not be easy for me to impersonate a mourner. I had not liked Aunt Clarice and had felt vaguely contaminated when in her company. She hated herself and her very existence weakened my own already compromised defenses against the infection that had caused her condition. I may have even
feared
her because of her exuberantly destructive honesty. Her cancerous idea of herself had been supplied to us all by a common nemesis, and having had no independent idea of herself to embrace, she embraced with lunatic passion the idea she’d been supplied with by those largely responsible for her low social station. Quaffing this poison seemed to have been the central point of her life. Inasmuch as she loathed herself because of her color, she’d had little choice but to loathe me and the rest of us for the much the same reason. Nonetheless, we were a family and appearances were, well, appearances.
I had not been to a funeral or inside a church, even, since Gordon’s funeral seven years before.
Jeanne and I arrived late in the city and drove up to the funeral home just before the service was to begin. A young yet-to-be-ordained seminarian had been given by the family a small fee of twenty-five dollars to say a few generic words during the service. We were met at the door by a funeral home official in a black suit who handed us a short program and ushered us to seats in the middle of the little chapel’s first row. Aside from the four March family members and Jeanne, the room, which could seat up to twentyfive people, was empty.
The five of us sat square on, eye level to the metallicblue casket two feet in front of us. I sat to the left of my grandmother. Jeanne sat next to me. My father sat to my grandmother’s right. My mother sat next to him on the end.
The seating juxtapositions represented well the healthless state of all the family I had left in the world—two sides linked together by a grandmother, who would serve as all the two camps of estrangers would share in common for the rest of their lives.
My mother and father never looked at me during the brief service, nor I at them. They were never formally introduced to Jeanne, to whom I had become engaged just four days before. By then, I had told Jeanne everything, as well as how difficult it would be to attend the service.
It was not long after Gordon notified Harvard that he would be coming to study there in the fall that he invited me to go with him on Friday night over to the north side of Richmond to a teenage hangout called Stell Schell’s which was located on the black side of Brooklyn Park Boulevard, the city’s Mason-Dixon line.
My sight was blurring. It always did this when I was induced to reconstruct what happened that night. I had never spoken to anyone about this—doctor, friend, not even Jeanne, and, of course, not my parents—but some psychosomatic mechanism disturbed my sight, slightly warping objects like the chrome casket rail-handle reflecting light into my eyes which had begun to water inconveniently.
We took a city bus from Church Hill to Broad Street downtown where we transferred to the bus that would take us up to the north side.
We had been happy together that night, both of us more voluble than usual, Gordon going on about taking Harvard by storm, I in praise of him though nagged by an irritant envy, provoked by my parents’ disproportionate and lightly veiled favor for him.
Still, I was very proud of him. Getting into Harvard was no small deal in our town, especially for one of us. I loved him and wished for a moment that I were more like him. But I wasn’t, and couldn’t be.
“As soon as I get control of my books, I want you to come up and see me. I can introduce everybody to my little brother. Okay? We’ll be what’s happening. The March brothers take Cambridge. What do ya say?”
“Sounds good to me.” Daddy would never allow it. Gordon and I knew this, even though he had meant what he said.
“I am told that Sister Clarice was a good law-abiding woman, and deep down a …”
We were sitting just in front of the rear exit door, talking on about the future, and paying little attention to where we were. There were no other people on the bus and no one standing on the street by the bus stop signs trying to hail it. The bus was moving fast enough by then to cause the big heavy-duty tires to whine sonorously.
“I should be ashamed of myself for dragging you out on your ankle, but you need to get out more, man.”
“It’s okay. You know me. I just don’t like a big crowd of people.”
“You’ll be fine. Cheryl and Essie said they’d be here. Wait. You’ll see. It’ll be great.”
“Uh-uh. I can’t halfway walk.”
“I shouldn’t be here myself. I haven’t written my commencement speech yet. I got a thousand things, man …” Gordon looked out through the window and lunged across me reaching for the bell cord. “Shit.”
The bus powered past Brooklyn Park Boulevard and into the white area.
“Although I cannot say that I knew Sister Clarice, I do know that God has opened his arms to her …”
Gordon had pulled the bell cord too late. The bus was rolling at a good clip, and in no time was well along into a dark, white residential section of cookie-cutter bungalows with patch-sized lawns decked out with Confederate flags and minstrel statuary. From the shadowy street, we could only have looked like unwitting subjects for human sacrifice standing alone behind the glass of the brightly illuminated bus. I was badly hobbled and Gordon had to help me down onto the street where we would have two overlong blocks to negotiate back to the demilitarized dividing line of Brooklyn Park Boulevard.
“While she may have stumbled during her life, she is in the arms of God now …”
I had turned my ankle in a freak accident while walking home from school a few days before. The pain had subsided but the ankle remained badly swollen. I could not put weight on it without limping. We walked slowly, and felt better when we reached the lighted square of the first intersection. Halfway to safety.
I was having a hard time maintaining that it was Aunt Clarice in the casket two feet in front of my face. My eyes were flooded.
From the intersection, we could see ahead of us the bright lights of Brooklyn Park Boulevard.
“How are you? Can you make it?”
“I’m okay. I can make it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not so much anymore.”
“Only one more block.”
We were just boys. We were scared. Frightened stiff.
At the lighted intersection, the narrow streets that emptied into it looked as black as pitch. We saw no one before somebody—
From two round speakers in the room’s acoustic tile ceiling intoned “The Old Rugged Cross,” which I had always hated. Jeanne and my grandmother, not understanding, patted my hands consolingly.
—
yelled,
“
What are you niggers doin’ ova here?” the hateful voice drawling long the words.
They had come from the two sides and from the rear. We could not make out their faces. We had no idea how many of them there were. More than ten to be sure. Screaming at us from three separate gatherings in a chorus of profane and epithetic slurs mixed with promises of mortal violence.
We heard the scrape of metal.
“We gonna teach you fucking niggers somethin’ tonight.”
Silhouettes crept toward us in a pincer-like fashion. Emerging from the darkness, we saw that the silhouettes were not boys but men dressed in roughneck black leather vests and jeans, with angry florid tattoos marked on their shirtless chests and arms. Now we could make out their stormy fuming faces and they ours. The one shouting most of the imprecations carried a long open blade down by his thigh, stropping it as he walked. They were not so close that we would not have been able to flee along the open street behind us toward Brooklyn Park Boulevard had I been able to run even at quarter-speed, but I was not.
I was ashamed of my fear.
The worst of it was that the fear gripping me was felt for the very tormentors against whom bravery would have been the only available weapon with which to preserve that most important of indispensables: self-respect. The approaching faces could see my fear. My eyes shined with it. The faces delighted in what they saw.