big country straw hat pushed back off your head. Acting. And Tish, holding up the picture to study it, will say something like, Look at you, boy. You ought to be ’shamed. And your mask will drop and you’ll grin cause Tish is like Mom, and ain’t no getting round her. So you’ll just grin back and you are Robby again at about age seven, cute and everybody’s pet, grin at Sis and say, “G’wan, girl.”
Daddy’s father, our grandfather, Harry Wideman, migrated from Greenwood, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He found a raw, dirty, double-dealing city. He learned its hills and rivers, the strange names of Dagos and Hunkies and Polacks who’d been drawn, as he had, by steel mills and coal mines, by the smoke and heat and dangerous work that meant any strong-backed, stubborn young man, even a black one, could earn pocketfuls of money. Grandpa’s personal quest connected him with hordes of other displaced black men seeking a new day in the promised land of the North. Like so many others, he boarded in an overcrowded rooming house, working hard by day, partying hard at night against the keen edge of exhaustion. When his head finally hit the pillow, he didn’t care that the sheets were still warm from the body of the man working nights who rented the bed ten hours a day while Harry pulled his shift at the mill.
Harry Wideman was a short, thick, dark man whose mahogany color passed on to Daddy, blended with the light, bright skin of John and Freeda French’s daughter Bette to produce the brown we wear. Do you remember anything about him, or were you too young? Have you ever wondered how the city appeared through his eyes, the eyes of a rural black boy far from home, a stranger in a strange land? Have you ever been curious? Grandpa took giant steps forward in time. As a boy not quite old enough to be much help in the fields, his job was looking out for Charley Rackett, his ancient, crippled grandfather, an African, a former slave. Grandpa listened to Charley Rackett’s African stories and African words, then lived to see white men on the moon. I think of Grandpa high up on Bruston Hill looking over the broad vista spreading out below him. He’s young and alone; he sees things with his loins as much as his eyes. Hills rolling to the horizon, toward the invisible rivers, are breasts and buttocks. Shadowed spaces, nestling between the rounded hills, summon him. Whatever happens to him in this city, whatever he accomplishes will be an answer to the soft, insinuating challenge thrown up at him as he stares over the teeming land. This city will measure his manhood. Our Father Who art . . . I hear prayer words interrupting his dreaming, disturbing the woman shapes his glance fashions from the landscape. The earth turns. He plants his seed. In the blink of an eye he’s an old man, close to death. He has watched the children of his children’s children born in this city. Some of his children’s children dead already. He ponders the wrinkled tar paper on the backs of his hands. Our Father. A challenge still rises from the streets and rooftops the way it once floated up from long-gone, empty fields. And the old man’s no nearer now to knowing, to understanding why the call digs so deeply at his heart.
Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand. Black music, blues and jazz, came to town in places like the Pythian Temple, the Ritz, the Savoy, the Showboat. In the bars on the North Side, Homewood, and the Hill you could get whatever you thought you wanted. Gambling, women, a good pork chop. Hundreds of families took in boarders to earn a little extra change. A cot in a closet in somebody’s real home seemed nicer, better than the dormitories with their barracks-style rows of beds, no privacy, one toilet for twenty men. Snores and funk, eternal coming and going because nobody wanted to remain in those kennels one second longer than he had to. Fights, thieves, people dragged in stinking drunk or bloody from the streets, people going straight to work after hanging out all night with some whore and you got to smell him and smell her beside you while you trying to pull your shift in all that heat. Lawd. Lawdy. Got no money in the bank. Joints was rowdy and mean and like I’m telling you if some slickster don’t hustle your money in the street or a party-time gal empty your pockets while you sleep and you don’t nod off and fall in the fire, then maybe you earn you a few quarters to send home for that wife and them babies waiting down yonder for you if she’s still waiting and you still sending. If you ain’t got no woman to send for then maybe them few quarters buy you a new shirt and a bottle of whiskey so you can find you some trifling body give all your money to.
The strong survive. The ones who are strong and lucky. You can take that back as far as you want to go. Everybody needs one father, two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and that’s only eight generations backward in time, eight generations linked directly, intimately with what you are. Less than 150 years ago, 128 men made love to 128 women, not all in the same hotel or on the same day but within a relatively short expanse of time, say twenty years, in places as distant as Igboland, New Amsterdam, and South Carolina. Unknown to each other, probably never even coming face to face in their lifetimes, each of these couples was part of the grand conspiracy to produce you. Think of a pyramid balanced on one of its points, a vast cone of light whose sides flare outward, vectors of force like the slanted lines kids draw to show a star’s shining. You once were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever-expanding V that opens to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram’s horn or conch shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle’s eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door.
The old people die. Our grandfathers, Harry Wideman and John French, are both gone now. The greatest space and no space at all separates us from them. I see them staring, dreaming this ravaged city; and we are in the dream, it’s our dream, enclosed, enclosing. We could walk down into that valley they saw from atop Bruston Hill and scoop up the houses, dismantle the bridges and tall buildings, pull cars and trucks off the streets, roll up roads and highways and stuff them all like toys into the cotton-picking sacks draped over our shoulders. We are that much larger than the things that happen to us. Accidents like the city poised at the meeting of three rivers, the city strewn like litter over precipitous hills.
Did our grandfathers run away from the South? Black Harry from Greenwood, South Carolina, mulatto white John from Culpepper, Virginia. How would they answer that question? Were they running from something or running to something? What did you figure you were doing when you started running? When did your flight begin? Was escape the reason or was there a destination, a promised land exerting its pull? Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to? Is freedom the motive and means and end and everything in between?
I wonder if the irony of a river beside the prison is intentional. The river was brown last time I saw it, mud-brown and sluggish in its broad channel. Nothing pretty about it, a working river, a place to dump things, to empty sewers. The Ohio’s thick and filthy, stinking of coal, chemicals, offal, bitter with rust from the flaking hulls of iron-ore barges inching grayly to and from the steel mills. But viewed from barred windows, from tiered cages, the river must call to the prisoners’ hearts, a natural symbol of flight and freedom. The river is a path, a gateway to the West, the frontier. Somewhere it meets the sea. Is it somebody’s cruel joke, an architect’s way of giving the knife a final twist, hanging this sign outside the walls, this river always visible but a million miles away beyond the spiked steel fence guarding its banks?
When I think of the distance between us in terms of miles or the height and thickness of walls or the length of your sentence or the deadly prison regimen, you’re closer to me, more accessible than when I’m next to you in the prison visiting room trying to speak and find myself at the edge of a silence vaster than oceans. I turned forty-three in June and you’ll be thirty-three in December. Not kids any longer by any stretch of the imagination. You’re my little brother and maybe it’s generally true that people never allow their little brothers and sisters to grow up, but something more seems at work here, something more damaging than vanity, than wishful thinking that inclines us to keep our pasts frozen, intact, keeps us calling our forty-year-old cronies “the boys” and a grown man