My father bellowed at the two white-jacketed young men, one black, one white, “Get out —!”
An hour later, my grown cousin (called Brother) and I helped him down the hall, into the elevator, out to the car, and drove him over to the hospital. Each bump in the rutted Harlem streets made him gasp or moan. The day was shot through with his fear and exhaustion. The pain made him cry when, in his awkward white smock, he had to stretch out on the black, cold X-ray table. I held his hand. (“I’m going to fall. I’m falling …! Hold me. I’m falling.” “No you’re not, Dad. I’ve got you. You’re okay.” “I’m falling …!” Tears rolled down his bony cheeks. “It’s too cold.”) He had difficulty urinating into the enameled bedpan as I sat with him in his hospital room, and he made little whisperings to imitate the fall of water to induce his own to fall.
For most of my life, if it came up, I would tell you: “My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”
Behind that sentence is my memory of a conversation with my older cousin Barbara, who was staying with us. She was a doctor. I said: “I guess it’s going to take an awful long time for him to get well.”
Carefully, Barbara put her teacup down on the glass-topped table with the woven wicker beneath. “He’s not going to get well,” she said. Then, very carefully, she said: “He’s going to die.”
It was, of course, the truth; and, of course, I knew it.
It was also the kindest thing she could have said.
“How long will it be?” I asked.
“You can’t say for sure,” she said. “Two or three weeks. Two or three months.”
Later I went downstairs to see Mr. Jackson.
“Is Jesse in?” I asked his wife.
“Sure.” Ann was a little woman with glasses and meticulous hair. “He’s in the back.” She stepped from the door. “Just go on in.”
Sitting in the room that served him for an office, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the framed illustrations from the young people’s novels he’d written about black children growing up in the Midwest looking down at us from the walls, I told him what Barbara had said. Jesse was a teak-colored man, with short gray hair. Somehow he’d managed to be equally close to both my father and me, an extraordinary accomplishment as Dad and I had been so often at loggerheads.
“Yes.” Jesse put his pipe carefully on the desk, recalling Barbara with her cup. “That’s probably true.”
He let me sit there without saying anything else, while he puttered around in his office, a full twenty minutes before I went back to our apartment upstairs.
An early October afternoon a heavy handful of days later, we were called in the morning to go over, and, in the darkened hospital room, I smiled and said, “How’re you feeling …?” while my younger sister reached through the oxygen tent’s plastic, scored with light from the floor lamp, to squeeze my father’s long hand with its slightly clubbed fingers. His face was lax and unshaven. “Yes,” he said hoarsely, “I’m feeling a little better …” After I followed her into the hall, her own face broke slowly apart before she covered it with her hands to cry, while some of my aunts stood in the corridor, speaking quietly of the kindnesses of one particular white nurse from Texas.
My sister and I rode home on the bus together, alone.
Sometime near five, I had just stepped from the living room as my sister came out of her room in the back, when the lock on the hall door between us ratcheted. The door swung in. Then my mother and aunts erupted through, all at once:
“It’s all over! It’s all over — the poor boy — he’s gone! Oh, the poor boy!”
(That was one of my father’s older sisters, Bessie. As the announcement broke through the women’s sobs, why, I wondered, feeling distant, do we turn in stress to such banalities?)
“No more suffering! It’s all over!” My Aunt Virginia’s voice might have been that of a traffic policeman clearing the road, as she led in my mother, an arm around her shoulders. “He’s out of his pain.”
The four of my father’s sisters, Bessie, Sadie, Laura, and Julia, as well as my mother, were in tears. (Only Virginia, my mother’s sister, was not crying.) All six women — I realized — already wore black.
That evening, over Mom’s protests, I went walking by Riverside Park. Dead leaves mortared the pavement around Grant’s Tomb. For some reason, sitting on one of the benches beside the public mausoleum, I took my shoes and socks off to amble barefoot on the chill concrete, beneath the mercury vapor lights, notebook under my arm. I’d been trying to write an elegy. It began, “They told me you were not in any pain …” because, for some reason, that’s what people had been saying to me about him a week now, even though every movement had made him gasp, grunt, or grate his teeth.
Days later, in suit and tie, I sat beside my mother in the front row of folding chairs in the funeral chapel, watching Brother (the same cousin who had driven us to the hospital, and who had been running my father’s funeral business a year now, since Dad had been too ill to work) go up at the end of the service to the casket banked left and right by flowers, take the corpse’s hand in his, and, with a sharp tug, remove my father’s ring. Then he reached up to lower dark, gleaming wood. Moments afterward, outside the funeral home on Seventh Avenue among milling relatives and friends, he handed the ring to me and I slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, before I got into the gray, nestlike softness of the funeral car for the ride to the cemetery.
Ten years ago, in 1978, while I was at the typewriter table in my office one afternoon, with Amsterdam Avenue’s commercial traffic growling by five stories down, I opened an envelope giving its return address as the English department of a Pennsylvania state college. Two scholars were undertaking a book-length bibliography of my then-sixteen years of published writing, to be introduced with a biographical essay of some fifty or sixty pages.[1]
Honesty? Accuracy? Tact? These are the problems of all biographers, auto- or otherwise. But the very broadness of the questions obscures the specific ways each can manifest itself. Few of us are ever biographized — especially during our lifetimes. No one is born a biographical subject, save the odd and antiquated royal heir. I have never seen a book on how to be a good one. But, like anything else, having your life researched and written about is an experience, with particular moments that characterize it, mark it, and make it what it is.
“My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.” This is just not a sentence that, when an adult says it in a conversation seven or a dozen or twenty years after the fact, people are likely to challenge.
And when, to facilitate my Pennsylvania scholars, I put together a chronology of my life, starting with my birth (April Fools’ Day, 1942), that sentence, among many, is what I wrote.
I don’t remember the specific letter in which one of them pointed out gently that, if I was born in 1942, in 1958 I could not possibly have been seventeen. In 1958 I was fifteen up until April 1 and sixteen for the year’s remaining nine months. (Certainly my father didn’t die when I was fifteen or sixteen …?) WBAI-FM did not begin to broadcast till 1960. There were no Penderecki recordings available in 1958. Various researches followed, along with more questions; a sheaf of condolence letters to my mother turned up — one from a man I’d never heard of, now living somewhere in Europe, who recalled teaching my father to drive in North Carolina, when my father was seventeen or eighteen — the first time it ever occurred to me that, at some point, he must have learned. Finally, in an old Harlem newspaper, a small article was unearthed that confirmed it: my father died in the early days of October 1960.
1
Michael W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard,