The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart

  Did you ever wonder how we must have appeared to our mothers? I have often wondered this. Once, in the days following the birth of Our Child—for she would not speak of sex or childbirth before I had a child—my mother broke a self-imposed taboo to speak to me of rape. Or rather, of how she had avoided rape. I have a feeling now that she was the kind of woman who would have said a woman could not be raped: though her own light-colored face belied this, surely. People who are routinely violated over centuries make curious denials. But I would speak to her of rape, as I spoke to her of everything that mattered. And she told me the following story: That one day she and her sisters and brothers were walking down a deserted road, and white men began to make advances toward and then to chase the girls. Her brothers ran away, leaving the girls to fight or run as best they could. She understood their behavior, of course, but there was sadness in her telling of it. If they had tried to protect their sisters they would have been murdered without a thought. Luckily, she and her sisters were strong and fast; they simply outran their would-be rapists.

  Do you remember how I used to suddenly develop passions? I am still that way. In Mississippi I began to crave arrowheads. It came upon me as suddenly as the desire, years before, to write poetry. I hungered for the sight of them. I ached for the feel of them in my hand. Now I think this was perhaps another beginning of the endless understanding of who I really am. In childhood I must have longed for pebbles, for certain tree leaves, for the sight of the river. For the taste of earth. I remember that I placed an ad in the paper, and that there was a response. I began to collect arrowheads. A few wondrously whole, many broken or chipped. All precious to me. I even collected the stone from a tomahawk. I collected arrowheads for years, and then began the slow, deeply satisfying ritual of passing them on. And yet, since then I’ve never been without. On the kitchen table where I am writing this there is a small wooden bowl from Africa that holds a remnant of what was once a large collection. Our Child has never known her mother without arrowheads, without Native American jewelry, without photographs of Native Americans everywhere one could be placed. Craft and art and eyes steadied me, as I tottered on the journey toward my tri-racial self. Everything that was historically repressed in me has hungered to be expressed, to be recognized, to be known. And these three spirits—African, Native American, European—I knew I was bringing to you. In the early days I wrote you a poem about this. And now I wonder if these three spirits were fighting, some of the time I was so depressed. That the Native American and European, no less than the African, desired liberation. Exposure to the light. My sister, who looks more Cherokee than me, and more European, tells me the Cherokee great-grandmother from whom we descend was herself mad. She was part African. What did that mean in a tribe that kept slaves and were as colorist, no doubt, as the white settlers who drove them from their homes? I do feel I have had to wrestle with our great-grandmother’s spirit and bring it to peace. Which I believe I have done. So that now when I participate in Indian ceremonies I do not feel strange, or a stranger, but exactly who I am, an African-AmerIndian woman with a Native American in her soul. And that I have brought us home.

  Collecting the arrowheads from white people who’d found them on their land caused me to think a lot about how empty of Indians Mississippi was. I felt I was walking through a land thick with two- and three-hundred-year-old sorrows, thick with ghosts. Indians are always in my novels because they’re always on my mind. Without their presence the landscape of America seems lonely, speechless. No matter how long we live here, I feel Americans will never know anything about it. In any case, it has been destroyed now beyond knowing.

  Last night Harold and I took the kids and we went shopping at that big new supermarket out on Stribling Road. It is a wonderful place. Really huge, and with everything anybody could imagine to want or buy. From grits to lawn chairs. And the best part is that it stays open all night.

  So we got our two carts, me and Harold pushing one, the kids pushing the other, and we started down the aisles. Harold makes a real good salary, and he lets us buy anything we want. We bought a gallon of ice cream, after we’d bought all the daily kind of foodstuff.

  It was really funny, though, because ordinarily in Mississippi you never see interracial couples. Never. Though you see mixed-race children as much as you ever did. Mama says that’s not true; she said that, to let her grandmother tell it, it was during slavery that you saw more mixed-race children. Those were the ones by the masters that they had off the slave women. They would keep them or sell them, as they saw fit. Then during Reconstruction there were a lot of them because of all the white and black folks who worked together and fell in love, or in lust, or whatever. Anyhow, that’s kind of like now, I guess. But what that means is that here in Jackson, if you want to see interracial couples, the place to do it is at midnight at this all-night supermarket.

  Folks stare at us so much in the daytime, you start to feel like your skin is crawling. But at midnight there’s nobody much at the supermarket. Just the silly clerks, and they’re too sleepy to be as mean as they’ve been brought up to be.

  We saw Ruby and Josh, and Ruby’s four kids. Josh always looks so outnumbered. Their own baby, Crissy, has light hair, but she’s as brown as her mom. And we saw Jerry and Tara; and I think she was drunk. She was wheeling that cart like it was Big Wheels. And then we saw the Lawyer and the Writer. Which is how Harold refers to them. I think he’s jealous, myself. He didn’t finish law school, and he claims women shouldn’t write about themselves.

  I asked him Why not? and he said that white male writers, like Faulkner and Hawthorne and Mark Twain, never wrote about themselves, and that they were masters at it. And I asked him whether this didn’t come out of a tradition of being a writer but needing to keep quiet about the slaving and gunrunning and Indian killing in your family tree. In other words, I said, if white men wrote truthfully about themselves, how could they continue to fool the rest of us?

  Sometimes I make him so mad.

  The Lawyer and the Writer had their little chubby baby in their cart. And they were talking to her just like she was as grown as they were. No baby talk at all, and she’s still crawling. Do you want us to buy some eggs? they were asking her as we passed them. She said something back, like “goop,” and they thought that was yes, so they put some eggs next to her.

  I think the Writer suspects Harold doesn’t care for her. She always speaks real warmly to me; but she leaves her husband the job of saying anything much to Harold. I even think she knows he talks about her. Because one time we ran into them at the picture show—also in the middle of the night—and this was just about the first time we met them, I think. Harold and the Lawyer were making small talk, looking just like two ordinary white men, anywhere. And then when me and the Writer walked back over to them—we’d been to the rest room—Harold turned around to her and said: I hear you’re a writer. Kind of smirking, the way he can do. Kind of sniffy. What kind of writer are you? And she looked him up and down and said, real firmly: A shameless one.

  The Lawyer couldn’t help it. He loved his wife so much, anyhow. But when she said that, he just bust out laughing. His face turned as red as a beet. It is so funny to me that white people turn red like that. You can see all their blood. And she didn’t crack a smile, just turned on her boot heel and stalked off to the show. And after the show they were all hugged up on the way home, and the Lawyer was just kissing on her and she was kissing him back and everything about them said: Fuck Mississippi, this is good stuff.

  THE RUIN

  Our Child is trying to figure out where she fit in during those years. Where was she, for instance, when we moved from Mississippi and bought “the ruin” in Brooklyn.

  But here I shall do something I did often when we lived together: veer off into another world. A world of musing, of speculation, of merged fact and fiction. The world of lives glimpsed, but glimpsed to the bone; the world in which one passing word might become a written life.

  Do yo
u remember Harold and Dianne? He was blond, from Idaho. She was a local black woman with children. I used to wonder why we were not closer to them; I envied them their raucous and colorful and child-battered household. And I remember that you always commented on the fact that Dianne was “so humorless” and you wondered what Harold “saw in her.” One day you said he’d told you: Her secret apparently was her expertise at oral sex. I had not warmed to Harold; now I knew why. Although it was Harold who one day said something I’ve thought about all these years: To stay alive to yourself, you must keep doing the thing that gets you kicked out. He had laughed, saying this. Every choice I make in life, he said, to my Republican family, is more abhorrent than the last. They’d almost committed suicide after meeting Dianne.

  I could imagine him up there in Idaho, on the family ranch, six thousand acres wide, his eye pressed against the aperture of the television screen, lusting after the possibility of growing a wider internal, spiritual self that seemed, at the time, to be offered by black and white confrontation in the South. As far as he knew, there were no black people in Idaho, and, curiously, it was his love of the cattle his family raised, his empathy as they were loaded onto boxcars and shipped to a market back east, that made him think the blacks he saw being beaten up on television might be people too.

  He was one of the white men who supplied me with arrowheads. It was from his ranch that the tomahawk came. He definitely thought no Indians still lived in Idaho. I think of him whenever I give readings there, and Indians, some of them friends of mine, claim front-row seats.

  Harold and Dianne are both dead now.

  At a reading in Oxford, a shy son and daughter came up to me. I was busy hugging on Ned Bing, the indomitable white pastor whose house was firebombed and whose face was badly battered by members of the Klan. It had been years since we’d seen each other. He has no idea how much I love his face; and I didn’t tell him, as I should have, as we stood surrounded by half the town. However I did manage to kiss him just where they’d laid open his jaw, and I pulled on the big, bright pink ear that was stitched back on halfheartedly at the racist hospital, and that managed, out of sheer love, to hang on. And then I stepped back, and there they were, the grown children of Harold and Dianne. Black children, because she’d had them by someone else, some black high school sweetheart, long before Harold arrived. Big brown eyes, dimpled smiles, skin like warm silk. Hair in dreads.

  We are the children of Harold and Dianne, they said in unison. Clearly a line rehearsed, since they’d anticipated being shy in front of me. Goddess, I thought, who are they talking about. And please ma’am, I pleaded with Her, let me soon remember. They were that impressive. I wanted to be worthy of them. My face, you always said, was completely readable. It must have been so then, as I rummaged through my Mississippi memory bank, because they laughed. Bust out laughing, in fact. And I saw Dianne’s lips, her rarely glimpsed dimple—and realized she’d almost never smiled—and what her hair would have looked like if she’d ceased to straighten it, and just let it grow. I even saw, especially in the boy, some of Harold’s supercilious cockiness. The way, in Mississippi, he seemed arrogant even just standing on a corner. He was a hard white man for blacks to cotton to, so to speak. Ah, I said, seeing now what he might have looked like as a black man, and opened my arms.

  They flowed into me, both of them, in an embrace that seemed to last forever. They flopped and draped, one to a shoulder, about my body, which met them as if it were a tree. Not a stiff tree, but one that just bends to the ground when there’s a wind. A weeping willow. Do you ever wonder, old lover of mine, where so much love comes from? I wonder this often, because no matter how distressing the world is, wherever I am, there never seems to be a shortage of love. Is this true, as well, for you? We hugged for so long, in fact, that Reverend Bing returned, and gathered the three of us close to him.

  Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up wherever we perceive that another human has survived. As human. In any case, the three of us left the throng that had filled the reading venue and went next door to a café that specialized in fried oysters and grits. The food was bad when we lived in Mississippi. Remember? We used to drive all the way to New Orleans, a four-hour trip, just to eat decent food once a month. But here, in the town of Oxford, a bicycle ride from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s old plantation house, the food is exquisite, and I stuffed myself with oysters, while thinking of my father, whose taste buds I seem to have inherited, and who adored oysters, raw, stewed or fried.

  Ernesto and Rosa ate heartily. I would not have guessed tragedy was such a part of their life if they had not hugged me so deeply, as if my body were a kind of raft.

  You are one of the few people who knew our parents, said Rosa, after explaining that both she and Ernesto were completing degrees at the university.

  We lost them, you know. Said Ernesto.

  No, I said. I don’t know.

  Reverend Bing looked at me quizzically. I shrugged. I have dropped out of so much of the world that I am aware I miss news I should have heard. Did you know of their deaths? Did you read about it in the paper? Did someone tell you? I pushed away the remains of my lavishly buttered grits.

  Nowadays, when everywhere you look there is so much tragedy, so much sadness, whenever I am about to hear more of it, I scrutinize the person or persons who are about to speak. I am looking to see if they are still beautiful, regardless of the tale they are about to tell. And if they are still beautiful, before they say anything, I tell them that they are. This is because Greatness of Beauty is how I see God. God being the common name given by many people to that which is undeniably unsurpassable, obvious and true.

  You could not be more beautiful, I said to them. And this is so.

  Did you know that Dianne wanted to be a writer? I had no idea.

  But that was the first thing Rosa told me. Ernesto chimed in to say that Harold had not permitted her to publish anything. Blinking a bit nervously he said Dianne had spoken admiringly of my work, but that Harold had ridiculed it. He thought, said Rosa, that because you wrote about your own life, that you were shameless. He was terrified to think our mother would write about herself.

  And now we know why, said Ernesto.

  Yeah, said Rosa, throwing her napkin over her plate.

  You have always pestered me to tell you where I was the night before I moved in with you.

  This first line from Dianne’s diary conjured up her face for me. It is a funny line, no? A great opening statement for the novel she might have written, had Harold let her.

  How did I end up living with a white man from Idaho? The first time I saw you I hated your guts. I thought all blond people were stupid and that white skin looked diseased. We were taught that white people smell funny. Like wet dogs. But thank the Lord you didn’t have blue eyes, those hard glass eyes that might as well be playing marbles, and never show emotion and never even show fear. And you were busy trying to teach people how to vote and being impatient because, in their fear of you as a white man, they had a hard time hearing anything you had to say. If you’d cursed them and called them dumb niggers they would have heard you perfectly. But you were so polite, even while impatient, and called them Sir and Ma’am, and you just about shocked them out of their clothes.

  What was kissing you like, the first time? I remember feeling fear, because I was thinking Good Lord, where are this man’s lips? What must have happened to them? I mean long ago, maybe when the earth’s climate or something changed. I have kissed a lot of men in my life, and they all had lips, sometimes more than enough lips to tell you the truth. But kissing you I felt my mouth just kind of spreading all over your face looking for lips to match up to mine. I was seriously worried that I was blocking your nose. But you just kept going ummm, ummm, ummm, and pretty soon I quit worrying about it.