You've Got to Read This (106 page)

Then, they were like a matched team—like professional Spanish dancers wearing masks—while the slow piece was playing.

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost. Their arms encircling each other, their bodies circling the odorous, just-nailed-down floor, they were, at last, imperviousness in motion. They had found it, and had almost missed it: they had had to dance. They were what their separate hearts desired that day, for themselves and each other.

They were so good together that once she looked up and half smiled.

"For whose benefit did we have to show off?"

Like people in love, they had a superstition about themselves almost as soon as they came out on the floor, and dared not think the words "happy"

or "unhappy," which might strike them, one or the other, like lightning.

In the thickening heat they danced on while Baba himself sang with the mosquito-voiced singer in the chorus of
"Moi pas I'aimez ga,"
enumerating the
ga'
s with a hot shrimp between his fingers. He was counting over the platters the old woman now set out on the counter, each heaped with shrimp in their shells boiled to iridescence, like mounds of honeysuckle flowers.

600 • NO PLACE FOR YOU, MY LOVE

The goose wandered in from the back room under the lid of the counter and hitched itself around the floor among the table legs and people's legs, never seeing that it was neatly avoided by two dancers—who nevertheless vaguely thought of this goose as learned, having earlier heard an old man read to it. The children called it Mimi, and lured it away. The old thatched man was again drunkenly trying to get out by the stuck side door; now he gave it a kick, but was prevailed on to remain. The sleeping dog shuddered and snored.

It was left up to the dancers to provide nickels for the juke box; Baba kept a drawerful for every use. They had grown fond of all the selections by now. This was the music you heard out of the distance at night—out of the roadside taverns you fled past, around the late corners in cities half asleep, drifting up from the carnival over the hill, with one odd little strain always managing to repeat itself. This seemed a homey place.

Bathed in sweat, and feeling the false coolness that brings, they stood finally on the porch in the lapping night air for a moment before leaving.

The first arrivals of the girls were coming up the steps under the porch light—all flowered fronts, their black pompadours giving out breathlike feel-ers from sheer abundance. Where they'd resprinkled it since church, the talcum shone like mica on their downy arms. Smelling solidly of geranium, they filed across the porch with short steps and fingers joined, just timed to turn their smiles loose inside the room. He held the door open for them.

"Ready to go?" he asked her.

Going back, the ride was wordless, quiet except for the motor and the insects driving themselves against the car. The windshield was soon blinded.

The headlights pulled in two other spinning storms, cones of flying things that, it seemed, might ignite at the last minute. He stopped the car and got out to clean the windshield thoroughly with his brisk, angry motions of driving. Dust lay thick and cratered on the roadside scrub. Under the now ash-white moon, the world traveled through very faint stars—very many slow stars, very high, very low.

It was a strange land, amphibious—and whether water-covered or grown with jungle or robbed entirely of water and trees, as now, it had the same loneliness. He regarded the great sweep—like steppes, like moors, like deserts (all of which were imaginary to him); but more than it was like any likeness, it was South. The vast, thin, wide-thrown, pale, unfocused star-sky, with its veils of lightning adrift, hung over this land as it hung over the open sea. Standing out in the night alone, he was struck as powerfully with recognition of the extremity of this place as if all other bearings had vanished—as if snow had suddenly started to fall.

He climbed back inside and drove. When he moved to slap furiously at his shirtsleeves, she shivered in the hot, licking night wind that their speed was making. Once the car lights picked out two people—a Negro couple, sitting on two facing chairs in the yard outside their lonely cabin—half
EUDORAWELTY • 601

undressed, each battling for self against the hot night, with long white rags in endless, scarflike motions.

In peopleless open places there were lakes of dust, smudge fires burning at their hearts. Cows stood in untended rings around them, motionless in the heat, in the night—their horns standing up sharp against that glow.

At length, he stopped the car again, and this time he put his arm under her shoulder and kissed her—not knowing ever whether gently or harshly. It was the loss of that distinction that told him this was now. Then their faces touched unkissing, unmoving, dark, for a length of time. The heat came inside the car and wrapped them still, and the mosquitoes had begun to coat their arms and even their eyelids.

Later, crossing a large open distance, he saw at the same time two fires.

He had the feeling that they had been riding for a long time across a face—

great, wide, and upturned. In its eyes and open mouth were those fires they had had glimpses of, where the cattle had drawn together: a face, a head, far down here in the South—south of South, below it. A whole giant body sprawled downward then, on and on, always, constant as a constellation or an angel. Flaming and perhaps falling, he thought.

She appeared to be sound asleep, lying back flat as a child, with her hat in her lap. He drove on with her profile beside his, behind his, for he bent forward to drive faster. The earrings she wore twinkled with their rushing motion in an almost regular beat. They might have spoken like tongues. He looked straight before him and drove on, at a speed that, for the rented, overheated, not at all new Ford car, was demoniac.

It seemed often now that a barnlike shape flashed by, roof and all outlined in lonely neon—a movie house at a crossroads. The long white flat road itself, since they had followed it to the end and turned around to come back, seemed able, this far up, to pull them home.

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told—returned to the world it came out of. For their different reasons, he thought, neither of them would tell this (unless something was dragged out of them): that, strangers, they had ridden down into a strange land together and were getting safely back—by a slight margin, perhaps, but margin enough. Over the levee wall now, like an aurora borealis, the sky of New Orleans, across the river, was flickering gently. This time they crossed by bridge, high above everything, merging into a long light-stream of cars turned cityward.

For a time afterward he was lost in the streets, turning almost at random with the noisy traffic until he found his bearings. When he stopped the car at the next sign and leaned forward frowning to make it out, she sat up straight on her side. It was Arabi. He turned the car right around.

"We're all right now," he muttered, allowing himself a cigarette.

Something that must have been with them all along suddenly, then, was not. In a moment, tall as panic, it rose, cried like a human, and dropped back.

602 • NO PLACE FOR YOU, MY LOVE

"I never got my water," she said.

She gave him the name of her hotel, he drove her there, and he said good night on the sidewalk. They shook hands.

"Forgive . . . " For, just in time, he saw she expected it of him.

And that was just what she did, forgive him. Indeed, had she waked in time from a deep sleep, she would have told him her story. She disappeared through the revolving door, with a gesture of smoothing her hair, and he thought a figure in the lobby strolled to meet her. He got back in the car and sat there.

He was not leaving for Syracuse until early in the morning. At length, he recalled the reason; his wife had recommended that he stay where he was this extra day so that she could entertain some old, unmarried college friends without him underfoot.

As he started up the car, he recognized in the smell of exhausted, body-warm air in the streets, in which the flow of drink was an inextricable part, the signal that the New Orleans evening was just beginning. In Dickie Gro-gan's, as he passed, the well-known Josefina at her organ was charging up and down with
Clair de Lune.
As he drove the little Ford safely to its garage, he remembered for the first time in years when he was young and brash, a student in New York, and the shriek and horror and unholy smother of the subway had its original meaning for him as the lilt and expectation of love.

Paper Garden

by Jerome W i l s o n

Introduced by Al Young

603

JUST BEFORE I LEFT CALIFORNIA TO SPEND THE FALL OF 1992 AS A visiting writer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I myself had been a Spanish major during the Cold War fifties,
Ploughshares,
the influential American literary quarterly published by Emerson College, Boston, invited me to guest-edit its Spring 1993 issue. Like a good freelancer, I accepted.

As always, being back in Ann Arbor affected me in profound and sometimes unexpected ways. Not only had I done a lot of growing up there, but it was at Michigan that I had decided to follow my heart and write fiction and poetry for the rest of my life. I had turned twenty-one in Ann Arbor and now, past fifty, I often felt as though I were crisscrossing my way simultaneously through museumized time and the good old ever-blooming present.

By December, my hundred-year-old grandmother was dying. A lifelong Mississippi farm girl transplanted quite late in life to Detroit, she was hospitalized and barely holding on. Once when I visited her, this dying woman, supposedly out of it, began to whisper and giggle and talk to me of events that had taken place more than eighty-five years ago. Mama spoke the names of people I had never heard of, even though she and my long-gone grandfather had helped raise and care for me much of my first decade at the family farm. Her smiling, half-muttered remarks about an early boyfriend made me think of the family-surrounded dying matriarch at the center of Katherine Anne Porter's amazing story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."

One lightless December afternoon, sorting through my mail and papers at the English office in Haven Hall, I struck up a conversation with Carolyn Stone, one of the older graduate students enrolled at the time in the MFA Writing Program at Michigan. When Carolyn asked me what I was up to, I told her I was editing a forthcoming
Ploughshares.

"What will the theme be?" she asked knowingly.

"I want to call it Celebration, but I doubt that's going to work out."

"Why?"

"Because the literary scene is anything but celebratory."

"Oh," she said, "I know a beautiful young writer back in Memphis. And his work certainly qualifies as celebratory."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yes," said Carolyn. "He's black, too, and he's only twenty-two or twenty-three. But he's having a hard time.

"He works nights bagging Fritos at the Frito-Lay factory, and it's affecting his studies. The department is getting ready to flunk him out, and he still gets a lot of writing done."

INTRODUCTION BY AL YOUNG " 605

"Carolyn, are you in touch with him?"

"I sure am."

"Then have him send me something to look at for the issue."

"I will."

And Carolyn Stone did just that.

My grandmother died in Detroit just before Christmas, and that was still very much with me when I got back to the Bay Area. I withdrew to my apartment and spent the next several weeks reading through stacks of manuscripts that were still arriving for the issue. One chilly January morning I opened the manila envelope containing Jerome Wilson's "Paper Garden." The moment I connected with his lead character William's opening lines, I knew I was in the hands of an exciting, new, warranted, bona fide writer:

Back in the days when life was easy and you could walk down the street at night and not worry about anybody knocking you over the head with some blunt object and taking all of your pocket change, Miss Mamie Jamison, the neighborhood kids' godmother who gave us money and candy and let us hide in her parlor when the big boys chased us from the playground, took seriously ill one summer and had to be put to bed.

"Paper Garden" celebrates everything I hold dear about storytelling. Not only does the story take place in an imaginable community, where there are actual families and kin and community concerns, but here was a voice telling us about the time an arty woman from New York City suddenly turned up in Tennessee to teach Shakespeare and give elocution lessons to somewhat countrified school kids. Everything about it felt and sounded just right. I probably bored a couple of workshop-buried, deadline-driven writer friends by thoughtlessly telephoning them to share my enthusiasm. Nevertheless, they registered more than polite enthusiasm when I read them passages aloud from Wilson's story.

Why did I fall in love with "Paper Garden"? Obviously, it must have reminded me of southern communities I remembered. But that wasn't enough. For me stories work best when they work at the level of magic; that is, when they somehow alchemize what you yourself have been through or think you know by turning that experience and knowledge into something golden. To quote novelist Joseph Heller, something happened. That is, something changed in me after I read about how Miss Marion, New York City actress and drama teacher, hits that little town of Harper and turns Little League football hopeful William "Sonny Buck" Jackson all the way around—

and a number of other townspeople as well. No one gets stabbed or murdered. There's no suicide, no rape, no incest, no sexual abuse. And neither is there there any trivialization of grand emotions; no, no minimalist or debilitating racialist posturing. Jerome Wilson stands back, gets out of the

606 *
PAPER GARDEN

way, and lets William tell us the story. And before it reaches its bittersweet, blues-suffused conclusion, the story tells us yet again what all the best stories have always confirmed. In his 1842 poem "The Spanish Student," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it this way: "There's nothing in this world so sweet as love, /And next to love the sweetest thing is hate."