Mozart and Leadbelly (5 page)

A VERY BIG ORDER: RECONSTRUCTING IDENTITY

A fifteen-year-old boy is standing on a riverbank in South Louisiana with a worn-out leather suitcase at his feet and a white pocket handkerchief in his hand. There is no way he can possibly imagine what he will be forty-one years and four months later, in December of 1989.

He is tall, thin; he is worried and frightened. But he continues to stand there as steadily as his legs will allow, because he knows he must go. He must go not only for himself, but for the others as well, because he will be the first male in the history of the family to go away and finish school. It had been planned by the others—if not planned, dreamed—long, long before he was aware of it and definitely long before he was aware of who he was.

There are others about him, his brothers and friends. They are not leaving home, so they are much more relaxed: they can play, chasing one another alongside the highway and up and down the riverbank.

Where the boy stands, he can see the road from which he has just left—the quarter. He cannot see his own home—it is too far down into the quarter—so he cannot see the old people who must still be sitting out on the porch with his aunt.

An hour ago he was packing his suitcase to leave. The few pieces of clothes—two shirts or so, but no more than three; two extra pairs of pants, underclothes, and an extra pair of shoes. Then there was the food that the old people had brought him, fried chicken, bread, tea cakes, pralines, probably oranges, and some unpeeled pecans. After he had finished packing, he tied up the suitcase and looked around the room. His ancestors, who had once been slaves, lived, if not in this house, then in one just like this one in the quarter. (He would be told that much later by a man who had spent all of his life here.)

The bus came around the bend of the road and he waved his handkerchief, and when the bus stopped he climbed on with the suitcase, and after paying his fare, he went all the way to the back of the bus where he was supposed to go, passing under the little signs hanging over the aisle that read “White” and “Colored.” He must have found a seat because he cannot remember standing all the way to New Orleans, where he would take a train to California. But he can remember that until he got to Southern California he saw no other white person in his car except the conductor. When he changed trains in Los Angeles, he noticed the different races together.

His mother and stepfather now lived in government-subsidized projects in Vallejo, California. In the projects were blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos—all the groups, races, who were Californians at that time. He got along with the blacks immediately, but it took him a while to get up enough courage to approach the others. He watched them play basketball, football, tennis. He had never done any of this, so he watched them. Eventually he would be a member, but now he stood back and watched everything that was going on around him.

One day while he and one of the Asians stood on the sidelines watching a football game, the Asian said to him (and he still cannot recall what brought it about) that he, the Asian, was not as good as white people are, but better than blacks, because blacks had not contributed anything to civilization. They, he and the Asian, were watching a football game, and from what he could see of the game, the black kids were holding their place as well as or better than any of the other group. So what was this little fellow talking about?

He had never thought himself less than anyone else, nor better. He had come from a world where the two races, white and black, were separated, but he had never thought he was less than anyone else. He had always carried his share of the load. He had gone into the fields at eight years old, and he could do as much work as any other eight-year-old could do. He had gone into the swamps at eleven or twelve, and he could pull the saw as well as anyone of that age could. So he had never thought less of himself than he did of any other. There were those who were stronger than he, those who were better ballplayers and marble shooters than he, but he was better in other things than they were—reading, for example; writing letters, for example. So he had never thought himself less. So what was this little fellow talking about?

Once upon a time there was a tall, slim, frightened black boy who sat in the back row of all of his classes in California. Once he was called on to explain what he knew about the American Civil War. None of his teachers in the South had ever mentioned the Civil War to him that he could remember, and he thought his instructor had asked him what he knew about the silver war. He did not know anything about a silver war either, but he talked about a minute through the laughter of his classmates—until the instructor told him to sit back down.

This same boy was also told by other recent black migrants to California that you were never supposed to tell people you came from the country. Best to say you don’t know a thing about picking cotton, or chitlins, beef tripe, watermelons—and all the rest of that country stuff like pig feet, pig lips, pig ears, pig tails. And you came from New Orleans—and never say N’awlens. It’s New Or-lea-ans. Which he tried to do for several months—until someone asked him about Bourbon Street. He knew nothing about Bourbon Street, and he realized that to go on lying to others meant lying to himself. Not only was he lying to himself, but he was also denying knowing the others, the ones he had left, and wasn’t that the same as denying who he was?

But it seems that we’ve skipped too far ahead. A while ago we were concerned with a young man who was searching for that elusive “I.” Part of it he found by reading American, Russian, and French literature. Now he had to sit and think: how could he relate this to the lives of his ancestors and to the people whom he had grown up around; how to articulate their, his own people’s, experience; how to articulate thoughts that they had been denied to articulate for over three hundred years? There were those recent migrants to the West who told him that digging into the past would be embarrassing, too painful; forget the past. But he wanted to become “I.” And to do that meant to confront the past.

An interviewer from one of the more popular magazines would ask him one day, “What book of all those you read helped you to become the person you are today?” After thinking awhile, he shook his head; he didn’t know. “Maybe it was the one that was not there,” the interviewer said, “and you felt that you had to put it there.”

His first effort as a writer was a love story between light-skinned and darker-skinned blacks, whose religions were Catholic and Protestant. He knew something about each because he had both in his own family. After five years of wrestling with the idea—articulating it was the problem for him, so as not to embarrass anyone—the book, or one little chapter, as he would call it, was finally accepted for publication. In the book he would have the main character say, “I feel like a dry leaf, broken away from the tree and now drifting with the least bit of wind toward no true destination.”

In each of the following books he found that he was moving farther and farther back into the past until he realized that to find the tree from which the leaf had been broken was to go back to those who sat out on the porch the day he left. What were they talking about that day while he was inside packing? What did they talk about the day before, the year before, years and years and years before? Because his aunt was crippled and could not go to them, they came to her, summer and winter, day and night, weekdays as well as weekends, and talked. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Creole; sometimes their voices would hush when he came into the room. What was so secret, so painful that they did not want him to know? Why did they say it was none of his business when he asked the question?

His aunt as well as many of the others were dead by now—twenty years later. He went to the younger ones, their children, their nieces, nephews, and asked could they recall a phrase the old ones liked using or a song they liked singing. Was there a Bible they liked holding even though they did not know the words, or a hymnal they had saved even though they could not read a verse?

Recently, at a high school in Lafayette, the writer was asked by a white student what was an American. The writer told the student that he had been searching for that answer for nearly forty years now. The student asked, “Do you think you will ever find out?” The writer said he did not know, but he could not think of anything else more important in his life to do. The student said, “Well, I sure got a lot out of Miss Jane Pittman.” The writer asked him what did he get. The student said, “Well, er, I, er, er—well, she made you think.” Good, the writer said. That’s good.

BLOODLINE IN INK

I left Louisiana for California in August 1948, not with a chip on my shoulder but with a block of oak wood in a sack on my back. I didn’t know what it was, its meaning. I only knew it was there, and it was heavy.

I decided I would try my hand at writing. Writing a book shouldn’t be too difficult; look how many books there were in the public library.

I began by writing longhand, just as I still do with the first draft. Then, in the summer of 1950, I convinced my mother to rent me a typewriter. I had gone through my book in longhand; now it was ready for typing. I knew absolutely zero about typing. Later, it would be proven that I knew even less about writing a book. Anyway, my mother rented the typewriter for me that summer of 1950, and for twelve hours a day I pecked and pecked with my right index finger. (I should mention here that my mother had had a baby in ’49, and I had to babysit and write my novel all at the same time that summer of 1950.)

So I did everything to keep Michael asleep while I worked on my novel. I found that if I kept something over his eyes awhile—my fingers, preferably (I only used one hand while typing, so the other one was always free)—he would eventually go to sleep, giving me time for my work. Later that summer, I wrapped up my manuscript and sent it on to New York. My little package probably looked more like a bomb than like a novel to the New York people, because it was returned to me later. And I took it to the backyard and burned it in the incinerator.

I had read many books in the Vallejo library, but I had read only what I wanted to read, what I liked reading. Now I had to read what was needed to make me a writer, if I was to be a writer. Now I had to look deeper into the story or the novel, into what the writer was really trying to tell us; now I had to analyze form, which I had never thought of before. “Read Twain,” they said, “especially
Huckleberry
Finn
; read Faulkner as much as you can; read Hemingway—see how ‘grace under pressure’ applies to you, to your people, especially to your athletes. Read Eudora Welty and Steinbeck; read James and Conrad. Have you read Flaubert?”

“No, I’ve read de Maupassant.”

“Read Flaubert. Have you read Cervantes and Shakespeare?”

“A little Shakespeare, but no Cervantes.”

“Read
Don Quixote,
and as much Shakespeare as you can. And the Russians?”

“I’ve read Turgenev and Chekhov.”

“You must read Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
; Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and
Punishment
; Gogol’s
Dead Souls,
and
The Inspector General
if you have the time. Read Thomas Mann. Read him. Read James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,
and you should also read
Dublin
ers. Forget Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for now. Read T. S. Eliot.”

“I don’t like that man. I don’t understand anything he’s talking about.”

“Read him. When you begin losing your hair and your teeth begin loosening in the gum, you’ll understand him. Read. Read. Read. You want to say something about your people? You did say you wanted to say something about your people, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then read, read, read—the tools of the trade. There are other tools that you’ll discover later, but these I recommend, and they are worthy tools, I assure you.”

So I read and I wrote, read and wrote. In all classes except creative writing I made average grades. In creative writing, only As. So I knew I was determined to be a writer. Everything pointed that way.

After San Francisco State College, I went to Stanford for a year. On leaving Stanford, I went back to San Francisco, where I rented a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed is one that you push into the wall during the day and pull out at night. Besides the bed, there were a small couch and two chairs in the room. I had a small kitchen, a small bath, a small hallway with a small dining table. The dining table would be my desk. There I was determined to make my name. From that small table, I would write the books that would bring me the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes, and lots and lots of money—l thought.

Earlier, I mentioned leaving Louisiana with a block of wood in a sack across my shoulder. Now this block of wood must reappear in my narrative. Chekhov said so. According to Chekhov, if a gun is over the mantel when the curtain rises, then it must be taken down before the curtain’s final descent. Therefore, being an admirer of Chekhov, I must include this block of wood somewhere in my story. Which reminds me of something else. One should never title a speech. Speeches should be either untitled as paintings are untitled or numbered as symphonies are numbered, but they should never be titled. Titles are so hard to stick by. (Many years ago I saw a French movie, one of those New Wave French movies of the fifties and sixties. It might have been
Rififi
—I’m not sure. But, anyway, the people inside the theater were advised not to reveal the ending to the people who were waiting in line to come inside. One fellow came out of the theater and told everybody in line to look out for the little white dog. Some people cursed him, some challenged to fight him, but he got away. We went into the theater and waited for the little white dog to show up on the screen. It never did.)

Anyway, earlier I mentioned a block of oak wood, and according to Mr. Chekhov, I must do something with that block of wood before closing.

But first, since the block of wood in the sack was only a symbol, what was its meaning? And again, as you may recall, I said that I didn’t know its meaning. Only that it was there, and that it was heavy, a burden to carry.

Now let’s go back to that one-room apartment with that block of oak wood in mind. In that room, I began to wonder what I should write about. At San Francisco State, at Stanford, on Guam, and in my home in Vallejo before going into the army, I had tried to write about the South, the old place, the old people, my brothers and sister, my friends, my church, and my little school. I remembered the letters I had written for the old people, the letters I had read for them. I thought about how I had gone to the store for them, how I had gone to the post office for them, how I had run from one house to another, borrowing a little sugar, salt, flour, or lard for them. I remembered how I had listened to them when they visited my aunt. I remembered how I had traveled with another aunt all over Pointe Coupee and West Baton Rouge Parishes, selling cosmetics. This aunt who sold cosmetics was Catholic and Creole, and I remembered how she and some of the other old Creoles talked about “them crazy ’mericans there on them plantation.” The other aunt, the one who had raised me, was dead now (she died in ’53, the same year I went into the army), but I could still remember her crawling over the floor, and cooking the food, and washing the clothes, and crawling across the porch to work in the vegetable garden beside the house after the sun had slipped behind our pecan tree. I could still see the rows of string beans and sweet peas and the rows of tomatoes and cucumbers where she worked.

In that small apartment sitting at that small wooden table, I could still remember the day I left Louisiana. And I could see those faces who didn’t wish to look back at me, the same ones for whom I had written and read the letters. And when they did look at me, no more than a glance. I saw in their faces their lives, the lives of their people, my people, the past. I saw in those faces at that moment what they would never be able to put into words. Now it began to dawn on me: the meaning of those letters that I had written for them. How I had had to create the letters. They would say, “Dear Sarah, I’m well.” Then they expected me to carry on from there. I had to tell Sarah all that they
wanted
to tell her but couldn’t. (“That’s why you go to school, ain’t it?” they asked. “Now say something to fill in both sides of that paper.”) And afterward, they would give me pralines, tea cakes, or a nickel.

In that room, I realized the meaning of that block of wood. These people had let me go to California, but I still had to write their letters. They made sure of that. Together, they cut a heavy block from one of our oldest live oaks, put it inside a strong croker sack, and said, “Here, and don’t you dare turn loose of that sack. You do, we’ll hear ’bout it, yeah.”

At San Francisco State and at Stanford, I was issued the hammer, the chisel, a grinding stone, and a few sharp knives to do the work. I got a part-time job at the post office in the evening; the rest of the time I was at the task.

A woman I had met while I was at San Francisco State told me how lucky I was to have this huge block of granite (she didn’t know it was oak) to work on, when many others who wanted to work had nothing at all to work on. I thought, “No kidding”—only I didn’t say “kidding.” I thought, “You don’t know the half of it. It wasn’t my choice; it was theirs.” But I didn’t say this to the woman, because she was a nice woman, and she and I would be very close friends for thirty-one years, until she died in 1987. She told me in 1956 that she would help me in every way she could, that she would like to see the work when it was done. She said that during the time I worked on the block she would help me buy and select clothes, she would cook and bring me food—but she wouldn’t give me money for whiskey or for other women.

I didn’t argue with the woman because she was very nice, and I accepted what she was kind enough to give me. And when I had chiseled off a chip from the block and carved it as well as I could, I would take it to her, and she would say yes, but not quite. And we would have small glasses of Stolichnaya vodka and orange juice, and we would sometimes go to a movie. She liked foreign films, so we would see one of the great Eisenstein films, or a Truffaut, or maybe one of Kurosawa’s films. Other times, we would go to a symphony, and always to a bookstore. There were great bookstores in North Beach and on Haight Street and Polk Street. Most of the bookstores had prints of famous paintings, and while she looked at the prints of Monet or Degas or Dufy, I would look at Modigliani and Van Gogh. Modigliani for the nudes, and Van Gogh for his country people. I like
The Potato Eaters
and the worker’s shoes and the people sowing wheat in the field. All this reminded me of home—Van Gogh did, not Modigliani.

And after leaving the bookstore or seeing a great film, I would go back home to work on the block. And I would go back to the woman to show her what I had done, and she would say yes, but not quite yet. And sometimes I would get angry with her, and I would ask her what the hell she knew about it. But after returning home, I would go to a pay phone and call her and apologize because I knew that she only wanted me to do it right. So I would go back and work again. I don’t know the number of hours or days or weeks or even months that I would put into one carving—but I do know that the Chinese grocer knew I had bought many cans of pork and beans, because one day when I came into his store he said, “Ah, the writer, pok-n-bens.”

“Did I say I wanted pork and beans?” I asked him. “Can’t you wait till I order?” He waited, eyeing me. Laughing inside, not out. “I want a can of Boston baked beans,” I said.

“Same shelf,” he said with a nod.

Then back to the block. Hours and days don’t matter. Ultimately I would take the little figure to the woman in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s most exclusive sections, where we could look out of the window and see the bay and Angel Island and Alcatraz and part of the Golden Gate Bridge. The woman always had classical music on the big German radio, and she tried to show me the difference between Beethoven and Brahms. Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth were her favorite of Beethoven’s symphonies; she liked Brahms’s Second and Fourth better than the First and Third. She tried to teach me the difference between the music of Ravel and that of Debussy. And she told me never to say Debussy, but to say De-be-see. She tried to get me to say Bach the way she did, but I told her it sounded as if I were trying to get phlegm from the roof of my mouth. “Have it your way, E,” she said. “Remain ignorant.” One day when I came to her apartment with one of my little carvings, I heard on the radio what I thought was a great piece of music. I asked her what it was, and she told me it was Modest Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.
She told me that if I listened closely enough, I would hear that the music was constantly changing, which meant that the viewer had moved from one picture to another. And she told me that if I listened closely enough, I could hear that each change was definitely different. “Just as characters should be different in a book,” she said. “lf you like the record, I will get it for you.”

“I like it,” I said. “I like it very much.” And since then, music has always been one of the tools.

One day the woman said, “The work is getting better. We’ll send it to the people in the big city and see what they think of it.” So we did. And we got a message with the little figure saying, “Yes, but . . .” And I told the woman I was very tired and I doubted that I could go on. She pushed: “Yes, you can go on; I’ll be there to help you go on. You’re blessed.”

“I’m cursed, not blessed; I’m damned,” I said.

“You should be honored that they chose you,” she countered. “One day you’ll be thankful that you went on.” (At that time, I thought the woman was crazy, and I thought myself crazier, but still I went back.)

Some nights, I would go for long walks in the wind and fog, and I would say out loud, “Please relieve this load from my shoulder. I don’t need the honors. Pass it on to someone else who deserves it more.” And when it was not taken away, I thought more than once about Ambrose Bierce. Why not walk away, as he had done, and never be heard of again? Some of my friends were going to Africa, Mexico, Europe. But on their return, they seemed worse off than before they left. I began to wonder if I had the nerve for the big drop from our famous Golden Gate Bridge. My aunt, whom I loved more than anyone else in the world, was dead now, so what did I owe this world? I owed this world nothing.

But back in that room, I would see those faces again, on the porch and by the fire. And I would see my aunt crawling over the floor, and cooking the food and washing the clothes, and never ever complaining. And I would see the faces of many of my friends who never had my chance. And I would pick up the hammer and the chisel or one of the knives and go back to work.