I, Rainy Betha,
from the top-branch of race-hatred look at you.
My limbs are bound, though boundless the bright sun
like my bright blood which had to run
into the orchard that excluded me:
now I climb death’s tree.
The pruning-hooks of many mouths
cut the black-leaved boughs.
The robins of my eyes hover where
sixteen leaves fall that were a prayer:
sixteen mouths are open wide;
the minutes like black cherries
drop from my shady side.
That confusion, the near-gnostic fusion of two lives, tree and hanged person becoming one, seems to me perfect, as does the poem’s fine concluding image, minutes like black cherries drop from my shady side.
Newly returned from my recon of Alouette’s workplace and bibliophilic dinner at Tender Buttons, I sat at the kitchen table in LaVerne’s old house thinking about David, with Ford’s poem, especially that last line, ticking in my head. Deborah had left a note on the refrigerator, in a space we’d agreed to keep clear of the archaeological litter of old messages, scrawled drawings, unpaid bills, clippings and photos that scaled the rest: Casting tonight, may be late, VERY late, love you. That had made me remember another note encountered years ago (Home soon) on a picture postcard. Then the poem.
Back when I was writing more or less regularly and able to delude myself I might more or less make a living at it, I’d always kept notepads within reach. Now I found one on a shelf beneath an alluvium of receipts and unopened mail, food coupons long expired, blotched handwritten recipes, turned-back sections from the Times-Picayune or New York Times, half a paperback copy of Huckleberry Finn, and a Loompanics catalog. When I slammed the pad’s edge against the table, dust, cat hair and dessicated insect parts fell away. Further down in the compost heap I found a skittery ballpoint.
Your faces turn up to me, those I know and those I’ll never know, there’s little difference. All your sad mouths and hungry eyes and wayward feet, all your stories waiting to be told. But who will tell them now? This gentle sun is high. It waits for me. Minutes like black cherries drop from my side.
Deborah came home well past midnight to find me still there at the table, sheaves of pages pushed to the back, against the wall. We talked awhile distractedly, she went up to bed, I brewed a pot of strong coffee, made sandwiches, and went on scribbling. Just after six that morning-by this time I’d moved out onto the porch-I heard her descending stairs, calling after me. Moments later, wrapped in a blanket, she came out. We sat together watching dawn spread its skirt above the trees.
“You’re writing again,” she said after a while.
“For the moment.”
“A book?”
“Could be.”
“That’s good, Lew.” She looked tired. “Kettle’s on for tea, if you want some. I could fix biscuits.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
I nodded. “Up early, huh?”
“Still wired.”
We sat quietly. Lights came on in upstairs bedrooms, bathrooms and downstairs kitchens. Marcie waved as she got into her car and backed out of the driveway on her way to Baptist, where she worked critical care.
“How’d the casting go?”
“Good. Better than good, really. You forget how much talent there is. Most everything’s in place, I think.”
“Great.”
“I keep telling myself that. Trying to see around the elephant: that it’s only a start.”
Out in the kitchen, the kettle began whistling.
“This kid came in,” Deborah said. “He’s fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Shorts hanging down around his calves, shirt two or three sizes too large, unlaced British Knights. Hair like tumbleweed. No experience, no photo, no resume. Walks in a slump, like he might collapse, boneless, any minute. God knows what got him there. Or what prompted me to give him a shot. But I told him I’d like him to read from one of the choruses. He looks at me and says okay. Picks the book up, looks at it once, and puts it down. Then he starts in. And I realize he’s got it, words, rhythm, the whole thing, just from that quick glance. But he’s not doing it straight. He’s jamming the part, spinning out this weird reggae/hip-hop thing from Aristophanes’ words. And it’s just right, incredibly right.
“I had chills, Lew. Everyone did.” She stood, shrugging the blanket up around her. “You particularly desperate for coffee or tea?”
“No.”
“Then the hell with it, I’m going back to bed. Join me?”
“I want to read through this first.”
I listened to her mount the stairs, heard the radio come on, toilet flush, water run into the sink. Looked at the pages I’d shuffled more or less into order.
A black man is about to be hung on the oak beneath which he played as a child, often as not with the children of white neighbors and overseers. Latterly he’s become a kind of minstrel, a guitarist and singer, a storyteller. He looks out at all these other faces and something suddenly fills him, something he doesn’t understand, can’t name, has never felt before. He begins telling jokes, riffing on his fate. The entire novel, 125 pages, takes place in the moments before he drops.
There are altogether too many explanations, Peter De Vries writes, too many systems. They cancel one another out, till only the why remains, the question mark we can’t rid ourselves of: that fishhook in the heart. Trying to understand, we cry Let there be light-and only the dawn breaks.
Researching, I’d found in Xavier’s archives the vestige of a black newspaper published around the turn of the century, documenting community life in a town whose black population essentially had been shipped north to serve white male college students. No record of who might have edited, written or printed the newspaper: all invisible men. Only this microfilm image of the front page survived. Stories were continued to inside pages that no longer exist.
Chapter Thirteen
One o’clock of a blurry afternoon. Clouds dragging low in the sky, like the bellies of middle-aged men in bars and bowling alleys. Don has something unidentifiable, fried chicken maybe, or soggy brown cauliflower, on the plate before him. I’ve had three hours’ sleep and can’t even remember dressing to get here. Blur reigns.
“Thanks for coming, Lew. I need you to tell me how crazy this is.”
“Just as soon as you spoon all that up. Be a brave boy, now.” I thought of Virgil, a kid from the sticks like myself. Can’t imagine why. Because Deborah’s wrestle with Greek comedy had body-slammed me into some classical mood? “After which, I’m your man. Crazy being something I know.”
What I didn’t know was where the hell this was going. I looked out over the plain of starched sheet, pale face, across jagged peaks of lumpish brown rising from the flatland, past the forkful of same entering his mouth. Soft light in the windows of his eyes, self there inside groping its way along dim corridors, bumping into doorways. Never a man to seek another’s sanction. And not quite the Don I was used to.
“What do you think of Derick, Lew?”
“Kid that shot you.”
“Yeah. Jeeter.”
I shrugged. “No reason to give it much thought. Should I have? He seems like a good enough kid, I guess, underneath it all. Maybe you do have to scratch deeper than with most.”
“Yeah. Maybe. And maybe you scratch deep enough, we’re all pretty much the same. Derick and I get along, you know? Could be there’s some kind of real connection. Who the fuck knows?”