tameness of these mountains, the incongruity fitting right in, a
harmony, a simple delight. The mountains and the house went
hand in hand: what would the mountain be without the simple
old house? The cold came from the sky and rested on the
ground: touched the edges of the mountains high up and
reached down into the valley and edged along the road and
paced restlessly on the earnest ground. The cold could
overwhelm a human with its intensity, its bitterness, like some
awful taste rubbing on the skin. But in the fragile wooden
house it was warm: so the cold was not the terrifying cold that
could penetrate even stone or brick: this must be a gentle cold,
killed by small fires in charming fireplaces and rattling
radiators in tiny rooms.
Emmy and I never touched, outsiders at this rich girls’
school, on this campus nestled in these welcoming mountains:
she from Kenya, me from Camden; her an orphan separated
from her family to be sent to a girls’ school in New England as
a little girl; me with the woman upstairs dying and the father
gone to work and the brother farmed out and me farmed out,
32
poor little poor girl; her angry and wild, dark black, separated
from everyone she loved and everyone she knew and arriving
here at this college after three or four finishing schools, unfinished, to be educated; me having gotten here so I could read and write; her wanting to go home; me never having a home
anymore again; her not a rich white girl here at this right
school; me poor; her upper-class where she comes from; me
low down; both smart, too smart, for our own good. Also: in
the world of the rich the poor are outcasts. Being black made
her poor, money aside. The others were like some distant
figures who spoke with cotton stuffed in their mouths: nothing
ever came out clean and clear; they had anguish but it was
fogged, having nothing to do with what she or I understood as
reaclass="underline" not that any of the premises were discussed, because the
rich make their own rules, democracy being one of them, the
democracy being in the pretense that no rules have been made:
they suspend them at wilclass="underline" they don’t know: it’s not their fault.
She had a country to think about and plan for: the freedom of
its people and her place there, now that she had been
“ educated, ” westernized, Europeanized: she knew it but not
what to do about it, and however happy we were, in her head
she was always on her way home, to a place where she would
still be an outsider, in exile from a youth that had been stolen
from her. I loved her. I never touched her.
*
The color that comes to New England in the fall does not
leave it when the trees die. Winter is not barren or monotone.
The great evergreens go on in muted light. The bare branches
themselves are tinted with purples and yellows and tawny
shades like deer flashing by at incredible speeds. The ground is
every color of brown and blue and black with yellow and red
running through it like great streaks, and the purple lies in the
ground like some spectral presence waiting to rise up. The air
is silver and blue as it edges toward black. It has the purest
white and the grim gray of a sober storm and in the center of
it will hang the most orange sun, flaming like dreaded fire. In
the fall there are only dizzying spreads of scarlet and yellow or
crimson and ochre: but in the winter, the colors are endlessly
subtle and complex: so many shades of brown that they cannot
be counted or named, so much purple in the air between the
33
trees and under the earth shining through and sliding down
the mountainsides that when the yellow seeps in or crowds in
next to the purple the mind renounces what it sees, saying:
impossible, winter is something brown and dead. The branches
of the trees are elegant, so strong and graceful, even under the
weight of icy snows: the ice rides them like the best lover, an
unsentimental kindness of enveloping, hugging, holding on, no
matter what the pressure is to shake loose. The white branches
stand in solemn quietude, witnesses without speech to the death
called winter, reproaches to the effrontery of other seasons
with their vulgar displays. The white on the mountains reaches
out to the human eye, persuading it that winter is entirely
sublime and will stay forever, also persuading the human heart
that nothing is beyond it— no cold too cold, no snow too big,
no winter too long, no death entirely bereft of some too simple
beauty, no tree too bare, no color too insignificant or too
subtle, no silence too still, no gesture too eloquent, no human
act merely human. In these winter mountains, the human heart
learns to want peace.
The trees near the fragile white house are endlessly high.
They disappear into some low-hanging cloud, all white and
puffy, wispy, watery, dripping ice that melts and burns in the
bright sun before it gets down to the ground. They are great
carcasses rooted in the solid ground, great thick things all
knotted and gnarled, or smooth and silver-streaked. They never
were just leaves: the bright colors deceived the stupid mind.
They were always their trunks, with great canals going through
them and animals living inside. They have other things growing
on them, even in the dead of winter, even partly buried under
the snow or whiplashed by it as the snow swipes on by carried
by the wind in a storm. The great trunks deceive us into seeing
them all white in a snowstorm: but they always stay themselves, the misery-racked survivors of every assault and intrusion, every wind and falling thing, every particle blown by or falling down, every stone or rock hurled against them or
brushing by: the trunk is immoveable while everything else,
except the ground underneath, moves or dies. This is a permanence beyond our own, redeemed by having no memory and no human speech.
Emmy had come from a place entirely unlike this and so
34
had I. She said almost nothing about hers, except that there
was a huge city, cosmopolitan, exciting, and a university, big,
important, and all around the lush, infested green of hot jungle
thick with insects and heat. It had many languages, tribal and
colonial. It was troubling somehow: because there might not
be room for her there. Mine was simpler, city, a suburb later
on briefly: telephone poles, asphalt, seasons, the ubiquitous
cement, the endless chatter of automobiles and human talk: