a wall goes up and easy memories stop.
When I think back, I have plenty of recollections of you as a kid. How you looked. The funny things you said. Till about the time you turned a gangly, stilt-legged, stringbean thirteen, we’re still family. Our lives connect in typical, family ways: holidays, picnics, births, deaths, the joking and teasing, the time you were a baby just home from the hospital and Daddy John French died and I was supposed to be watching you while the grown-ups cleaned and cooked, readying the house on Finance Street for visitors, for Daddy John to return and lie in his coffin downstairs. Baby-sitting you in Aunt Geraldine’s room while death hovered in there with us and no way I could have stayed in that room alone. Needing you much more than you needed me. You just zzz’ed away in your baby sleep, your baby ignorance. You couldn’t have cared less whether death or King Kong or a whole flock of those loose-feathered, giant birds haunting my sleep had gathered round your crib. If the folks downstairs were too quiet, my nerves would get jumpy and I’d snatch you up and walk the floor. Hold you pressed in my arms against my heart like a shield. Or if the night cracks and groans of the house got too loud, I’d poke you awake, worry you so your crying would keep me company.
After you turned thirteen, after you grew a mustache and fuzz on your chin and a voluminous Afro so nobody could call you “Beanhead” anymore, after girls and the move from Shadyside to Marchand Street so you started Westinghouse High instead of Peabody where the rest of us had done our time, you begin to get separate. I have to struggle to recall anything about you till you’re real again in prison. It’s as if I was asleep for fifteen years and when I awakened you were gone. I was out of the country for three years then lived in places like Iowa City and Philly and Laramie, so at best I couldn’t have seen much of you, but the sense of distance I’m trying to describe had more to do with the way I related to you than with the amount of time we spent together. We had chances to talk, opportunities to grow beyond the childhood bonds linking us. The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us.
Your hands, your face became a man’s. You accumulated scars, a deeper voice, lovers, but the changes taking place in you might as well have been occurring on a different planet. The scattered images I retain of you from the sixties through the middle seventies form no discernible pattern, are rooted in no vital substance like childhood or family. Your words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn. When we spoke, I was conscious of a third party short-circuiting our conversations. What I’d say to you came from the mouth of a translator who always talked down or up or around you, who didn’t know you or me but pretended he knew everything.
Was I as much a stranger to you as you seemed to me? Because we were brothers, holidays, family celebrations, and troubles drew us to the same rooms at the same time, but I felt uncomfortable around you. Most of what I felt was guilt I’d made my choices. I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. To get ahead, to make something of myself, college had seemed a logical, necessary step; my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I’d earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountains to Philadelphia. With that willed alienation behind me, between us, guilt was predictable. One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging, like the suntans people bring back from Hawaii in the middle of winter. It’s sure fucked up around here, ain’t it? But look at me, I got away. I got mine. I didn’t want to be caught looking back. I needed home to reassure myself of how far I’d come. If I ever doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty, rich white girls, a roommate from Long Island who unpacked more pairs of brand-new jockey shorts and T-shirts than they had in Kaufmann’s department store, if I ever had any hesitations or reconsiderations about the path I’d chosen, youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was.
Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any traces of the poverty, ignorance, and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned to Pittsburgh. Fear that I was contaminated and would carry the poison wherever I ran. Fear that the evil would be discovered in me and I’d be shunned like a leper.
I was scared stiff but at the same time I needed to prove I hadn’t lost my roots. Needed to boogie and drink wine and chase pussy, needed to prove I could still do it all. Fight, talk trash, hoop with the best playground players at Mellon Park. Claim the turf, wear it like a badge, yet keep my distance, be in the street but not of it.
Your world. The blackness that incriminated me. Easier to change the way I talked and walked, easier to be two people than to expose in either world the awkward mix of school and home I’d become. When in Rome. Different strokes for different folks. Nobody had pulled my coat and whispered the news about Third Worlds. Just two choices as far as I could tell: either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the Saints came marching in. Who the Saints, the rulers of the earth were, was clear. My mind was split by oppositions, by mutually exclusive categories. Manichaeism, as Frantz Fanon would say. To succeed in the man’s world you must become like the man and the man sure didn’t claim no bunch of nigger relatives in Pittsburgh.
Who, me? You must be kidding. You must be thinking of those other guys. They’re the ones listen to the Midnighters, the Miracles, the Turbans, Louis Berry, the Spaniels, the Flamingos. My radio stays set on WFLN. They play that nigger stuff way down the dial, at the end, on WDAS, down where WAMO is at home.
Some of that mess so dumb, so unbelievable I can laugh now. Like when I was driving you up to Maine to work as a waiter in summer camp. Just you and me and Judy in the car for the long haul from Pittsburgh to Takajo on Long Lake. Nervous the whole time because you kept finding black music on the radio. Not only did you find it. You played it loud and sang along. Do wah diddy and ow bop she bop, having a good ole nigger ball like you’d seen me having with my cut buddies when we were the Commodores chirping tunes on the corner and in Mom’s living room. The music we’d both grown up hearing and loving and learning to sing, but you were doing it in my new 1966 Dodge Dart, on the way to Martha’s Vineyard and Maine with my new white wife in the backseat. Didn’t you know we’d left Pittsburgh, didn’t you understand that classical music volume moderate was preferred in these circumstances? Papa’s got a brand-new bag. And you were gon act a nigger and let the cat out.
Of course I was steady enjoying the music, too. James Brown. Baby Ray and the Raylettes. The Drifters. Missed it on the barren stretches of turnpike between cities. Having it both ways. Listening my ass off and patting my foot but in between times wondering how Judy was reacting, thinking about how I’d complain later about your monolithic fondness for rhythm and blues, your habit of turning the volume up full blast. In case she was annoyed, confused, or doubting me in any way, I’d reassure her by disassociating myself from your tastes, your style. Yeah, when I was a kid. Yes. Once upon a time I was like that but now. . .
Laughing now to keep from crying when I think back to those days.
My first year at college when I was living in the dorms a white boy asked me if I liked the blues. Since I figured I was the blues I answered, Yeah, sure. We were in Darryl Dawson’s room. Darryl and I comprised approximately one-third of the total number of black males in our class. About ten of the seventeen hundred men and women who entered the University of Pennsylvania as freshmen in 1959 were black. After a period of wariness and fencing, mutual embarrassment and resisting the inevitable, I’d buddied up with Darryl, even though he’d attended Putney Prep School in Vermont and spoke with an accent I considered phony. Since the fat white boy in work shirt, motorcycle boots, and dirty jeans was in Darryl’s room, I figured maybe the guy was alright in spite of the fact he asked dumb questions. I’d gotten used to answering or ignoring plenty of those in two months on campus. “Yeah, sure,” should have closed the topic but the white boy wasn’t finished. He said he had a big collection of blues records and that I ought to come by his room sometime with Darryl and dig, man.
Who do you like? Got everybody, man. Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. Lightning and Lemon and Sonny Boy. You dig Broonzy? Just copped a new side of his.
None of the names meant a thing to me. Maybe I’d heard Leadbelly at a party at a white