Screening Room: Family Pictures

  “What’s for lunch?” Abi bellows in the direction of the house. Six of us sit at a broken table.

  A maid appears on the patio. “Egg salad sandwiches, Mr. Burson,” she says.

  “I hope you didn’t use that fake, healthy mayonnaise,” says Abi.

  “No, sir,” says the maid.

  “And we’ll have some of those bananas,” says Abi.

  “Them bananas is past prime,” says the maid.

  “We’ll take them,” says Abi. He turns to his guests. “I love overripe bananas. Lennie, did Mamele ever tell you about Jake’s still?”

  “Jake?”

  “Jake, Mamele’s second husband. How soon we forget. Jake kept the still in the tool shed at the house on Merwin Street. It was a gorgeous thing with a big copper pot and a long copper spout that led into a copper barrel. Jake used to boil overripe, mushy bananas and molasses to make the whiskey.”

  “Is that why Jake got put in jail?” asks Lennie, lighting a cigarette and taking long drags between bites of her sandwich. “Mamele was always a bit vague about the reason.”

  “No, Jake got put in jail because he borrowed somebody’s car for a week to play the slot machines at a gambling hall in Hot Springs. The problem was he didn’t bother to tell the guy he was borrowing his car. Mamele said she didn’t mind being married to a drunk and a cheapskate, but she wasn’t going to be married to a jailbird.”

  “Ha. That sounds like Mamele. What a mother we had.” Lennie pushes her sandwich aside, half eaten, and lights another cigarette. “They make good sandwiches at Marciano’s. Your father goes to Marciano’s almost once a week,” she says to me. “Hazel drives him. He’s such a sweet man, your father. One morning a year or so ago, he woke up horrified that he had forgotten to leave a tip the night before. So he had Hazel drive him back there in a pouring rain. He got out of the car, shuffled into the restaurant on his walker, and apologized to the staff. Left a gigantic tip. The manager told me about it. Keeps talking about it.”

  “Dickie was always like that,” says Lila. “When we were kids, he used to give me a quarter every week, put it in my school pencil box, because he thought I wasn’t getting enough allowance.”

  “Once Dad forgot an entire engine,” says my brother John. “It drove Mother crazy.”

  “Do tell.”

  “We were driving to Destin, towing our sailboat. That was when the Battles and the Steffens and we all had boats, and we were all going to Destin together in a caravan, towing our boats. Fifty miles into the trip, at a food stop, George Steffens and Joe Battle started comparing their outboard engines. They were such hotshots. Dad made the mistake of mentioning that he had a twenty-five-horsepower Johnson, a huge engine for a sailboat, and George and Joe were outraged. They wanted to see it right away. When we went around to the stern of our boat, no engine. First, we thought someone had stolen the engine while we were stopped for lunch. Then we decided the engine had fallen off, so we all got in our cars, the Steffens and the Battles and their boats in tow, and retraced our drive along the highway, trudging back toward Memphis. Mile after mile, for fifty miles, we didn’t see any boat engines lying on the side of the road. We drove all the way back to our house on Cherry. The three cars and boats crept up the driveway like a giant snake. And there was the engine sitting on the porch. Somehow, Dad had forgotten to load it into the boat. Mother was so embarrassed, she ran into the house and called a taxi and asked to be taken to Nashville. ‘Nashville is two hundred miles, Ma’am,’ said the driver. ‘That’ll cost you a hundred dollars.’ Which was a lot of money in those days. ‘Well, then, take me somewhere else,’ said Mother.”

  We are interrupted by some loud banging. Hanging precariously out of a second-floor window, a workman is attempting to repair a broken gutter. “I didn’t hire him,” says Abi, sheepishly. “One of my neighbors did. He said he was going to start shooting if I didn’t fix up my house. Evidently, I’m lowering property values. Let him shoot already. I’m eighty-seven years old. So shoot me.” Behind us, the dead plants turn to weeds, which turn to bigger weeds and finally a swampy yellow morass at the back of the property. When Abi’s wife, Marilyn, was alive, she took care of the place, but Marilyn has been dead fifteen years. Abi’s daughter Lizzy lived in the house for a number of years and took care of it, but she moved to Virginia with her husband and children.

  “Your mother almost married a fellow from Philadelphia,” Abi says to me.

  “When?”

  “That would have been sometime in 1946.”

  “Wasn’t she going with my father at the time?”

  “Going, but not gone. This other fellow, he was in the insurance business. He invited her up for a weekend in Philadelphia. They’d been dating on and off, as he had clients in New Orleans. So your mother went up with one of her friends from Sophie Newcomb, and the guy sees the friend and falls for her like a ton of bricks, so that was that. Your mother had to take the train back to New Orleans by herself. She didn’t even get one good dinner in Philly.”

  “The guy’s name was Wallace,” says Lennie. “He was a sensational dancer. But he always had three or four girlfriends in the air at once. He made Charlotte’s life miserable. That was Jeanne’s friend.”

  “Charlotte was related to Fannie Slepian, wasn’t she? A cousin or something.”

  “Really?”

  “Sad, sad Fannie.”

  “What was so sad about Fannie?” I ask. I remember Fannie Slepian from the times I would go to my father’s office in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She wore her hair in bangs and had a pair of black eyeglasses dangling around her neck. Extremely well organized, Fannie took care of the personal finances of the Lightman family members as well as most of the business of the office. Her fingers were always blue from handling carbon paper.

  “The way she pined over M.A. all those years and never got married,” says Lennie. “Fannie was a beautiful woman when she was younger. She could have had anybody.”

  “Don’t let them bad-mouth Fannie,” Aunt Lila whispers to me.

  “Nobody’s bad-mouthing Fannie. She was a loyal employee of Malco. It was just her misfortune to fall in love with M.A.”

  “Fannie was certainly beautiful,” says Abi. “She must have started at Malco right out of high school. That would have been around 1930 or 1931. M.A. was forty. Everybody knew that she was in love with M.A. She did anything he asked. She worked late at night and on weekends. But I don’t think M.A. ever touched her. She was too close. Men showed up at the office asking her out, but she turned all of them down. She lived alone with her cats. When M.A. died, Fannie was only forty-five or forty-six and still very good-looking. But she had this thing for M.A. For years and years, she kept a picture of him on her desk. She lived almost forty years more and died an old maid.”

  “That’s the most awful story I ever heard.”

  “Daddy shouldn’t have treated Fannie like that,” says Aunt Lila.

  “What did he do wrong?” says Abi.

  “M.A. knew,” says Lennie. “He knew the power he had over women. He chained Fannie to him and threw away the key.”

  “I remember a cruise to St. Thomas,” says Lila. “It was just after the war. Daddy had been dancing with all the attractive women and also drinking, which he hardly ever did. Mother had gone off to bed. It was just Daddy and me at a table, late, he was drunk, and he was talking about some new theater he was going to build, and suddenly tears came to his eyes. He looked at me and said, ‘Do you think that I’ve made your mother happy?’ I said, ‘Of course you’ve made her happy.’ And he said, ‘I haven’t been a very good husband.’ I think he wanted to tell me that he had been unfaithful to Mother, but he couldn’t quite say it. He just kept repeating that he hadn’t been a very good husband, with tears in his eyes. That was the only time I ever saw him cry. For all his philandering, I think he did love Mother.”

  Finally, the heat drives us back into the house. But it is time to leave. Lennie has a hair appointment, and my c
ousin Nancy is supposed to take care of her infant grandson this afternoon. As we walk through the living room, with its ornate chandelier and tattered rugs, Abi stops to show us an old book bearing the handwritten signatures of everyone who has owned this house since 1846. Just walking these few steps, he is out of breath, and he leans against the wall, panting. I look behind him across the huge room, through the half-open door to the garden, and then out to the wild forest of weeds beyond the patio. Abi puts his arms around me and gives me a kiss with his stubbly face brushing my cheek. I return the embrace. I hold him for a brief moment in this house of so many moments.

  The Old Cornfield

  Time fades away, but smells persist and faithfully bear the vast structure of memory, wrote Proust. This evening, after a dinner of fried catfish and black-eyed peas, I stroll through the densely settled neighborhood in Grove Park Circle, not far from where I grew up. The odor of honeysuckle saturates the air—sweet-petaled infinite drugged dream of youth, and I am transported back fifty years, when this land was empty of houses and paved roads, when this land was a huge tract of forests and ponds and honeysuckle bushes extending from Poplar Avenue on the south, to Walnut Grove on the north, to East Cherry to Perkins. This unending and mysterious territory, one or two hundred acres in all, my brothers and I called “the cornfield,” although there never was any corn here to my knowledge.

  After school, I would avoid the perpendicular streets and walk home by way of the uncharted cornfield. In the warmer months, I took off my shoes and waded into shallow pools, admired the water striders skating so effortlessly across the glass surface, scooped up tadpoles in the cup of my hand. What a world in the pond! Watery landscapes, thick mossy algae, squishy mud between my toes, pieces and particles of life squirming gently in my hand. Hours passed without notice. I followed little dirt footpaths not knowing where they led, leaving piles of rocks as markers for future explorers. I got lost. Turtles ambled across my path, stuck up their heads to feel the lay of the land, continued on unconcerned. I put interesting rocks in my pocket and plucked grasses and flowers. Each fragile pistil of a honeysuckle blossom had a tasty drop of honey at its end. When I grew tired, I sat on a high treeless ridge, from which I could see and name various paths winding through the thick bushes below—Rattlesnake Road, Little Bear Trail, Spider Andromeda. All names I had invented. Far, far in the distance was the faint spire of St. Mary’s Episcopal School.

  In the cornfield, the present was a vast blanket that covered the land. Future and past hid out, invisible. And if I did think of the future, it quickly wandered out beyond sight like the dirt trails around me and disappeared over the curve of the earth. Sitting on the ridge, feeling the wind on my face, I wondered if tadpoles knew they were destined to become frogs. I wondered what it would be like to be dead. I wondered if God was a man or a woman.

  “Here,” I say to myself, “under this concrete there once was a pond.”

  Memphis today is a modern city of seven or eight hundred thousand people. It bustles with shopping malls and Starbucks, several major universities, hospital systems, a complex of shops and restaurants and apartments in a new development on Mud Island. On the ruins of the old Hotel King Cotton on Front Street rises the twenty-one-story Morgan Keegan Tower, a financial center; out east is the thirty-four-story Clark Tower, crowned by a U.S. flag that is brightly illuminated at night and can be seen from five miles away. Since the early 1970s, Memphis has been home to FedEx, an aerial version of the great Mississippi passageway, and at any moment fifty FedEx jets can be seen waiting at the Memphis International Airport.

  Under this concrete there once was a pond. What is real? If the past is all that is real, because it is all that is reputed to have actually happened, then it cannot be real because it shifts and contorts in our mind. If the present is all that is real, then it too is not real, for it slips to the past as quickly as a breath. I look up to see three children kicking a red tetherball across the street. In a second, they will be old.

  Lorraine

  In a second they will be old. As I am now.

  After my summer in Illinois, in the mid-1960s, I did indeed go north for college. I returned to Memphis for spring recess in 1968, at the same moment that a union of black sanitation workers went on strike. The city government had rejected their demands out of hand—demands, for example, that they be paid the same as white workers. Mayor Henry Loeb, a stubborn man of six feet five inches, had a plantation owner’s attitude toward Negroes, as did a great number of white Memphians. This was exactly the kind of behavior I expected from a town where people couldn’t speak English correctly.

  The strike was growing violent. With backing from the NAACP, there had been protest marches downtown, during which the police sprayed the crowd with Mace. At the end of February, the city’s black clergy had called an emergency meeting. In every black church in the city, ministers and pastors were preaching against racial injustice. “We’s jes like the prophets of ancient days,” Blanche told my parents one Monday morning, after a rousing sermon at her Mount Olive Baptist Church the day before. “The Lord knows this ain’t right what’s goin’ on here. Knows it.” Blanche also talked about how the statue of St. Matthew on her church grounds had miraculously turned in the opposite direction overnight. Nobody had seen it happen, but there was Matthew, on Sunday morning, facing Carnes Street when he’d been facing Southern Avenue for forty years. It was a sign.

  The black ministers asked their congregations to support a boycott of Downtown stores and establishments. Sales plummeted. In mid-March, just before my visit home, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to speak on behalf of the striking garbage workers.

  In late March, while I was home, King came again, to lead a demonstration. Blanche sat anxiously by the radio, chain-smoking her Pall Malls. Since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the summer of 1963, Blanche had been a devoted disciple. “He’s goin’ to get hisself killed,” she said, “goin’ out there like he does, talkin’ the way he does. Lord help him. Lord help him.” As we listened on the radio, the demonstration turned into a riot. Shoplifters, pickpockets, and young militants began breaking store windows and looting. The police attacked the marchers, several people were shot, and one young black man was killed. Every store window on a two-block stretch of Beale Street was broken, and a hundred fires raged. With the situation running out of control, Governor Ellington called in four thousand National Guardsmen. Blanche was afraid to leave our house. We fixed her up with a bed in her old room attached to our garage. My parents and I debated about whether it was safe for me to go to the airport to return to college. By April 2, things had quieted slightly, and I flew out.

  The next day, King came back to Memphis for yet another demonstration and speech. Evidently his advisers had decided that Memphis was now the epicenter of the civil rights movement. They wanted to show that it was possible to have a peaceful demonstration, and they had studied the techniques of Gandhi.

  The next evening, I was having dinner at my college eating club, a thousand miles from Memphis, when I heard the news that MLK had been assassinated at a drab, two-story motor inn called the Lorraine Motel. It was one of those moments when you realize that you have just received fresh evidence that God doesn’t exist, that evil often wins out over good, and that the planet has suddenly careened off in a new direction. Mixed with my shock and sadness was an extreme personal embarrassment and shame. This national tragedy had occurred in my city. I wanted to apologize to my college classmates for Memphis, for the entire South. Journalists were calling Memphis a “Southern backwater” and a “decaying river town.” I was nineteen years old, and I decided I would never move back.

  King’s assassination temporarily terminated all racial reform movements in Memphis. Blacks and whites shuddered in mourning, helplessness, and anger. Stereotypes strengthened. As in many cities across the United States, white businesses fled the downtown area, which entered a twenty-year disintegration. The Cotton Carnival was over, at l
east for a good while.

  Marital Relations

  Caught up in the inches and minutes of our lives, we forget that we are specks on the surface of a sphere twelve thousand miles across, which hurls us through six hundred million miles of empty space every year—as it orbits about a bigger sphere of gas and fire. And that larger sphere, our sun, makes its own circuit about the center of the galaxy every two hundred and fifty million years. If we thought about such enormities, we would be unable to speak. We would be unable to write our few feeble words, build our flimsy cities. We would just wait for our minute of life and awareness to pass.

  It is late at night, the time of forgetfulness and the time of remembering. I am again visiting my brother John, the musician, in his large house in Collierville. Ronnie and David are here. It is just the four of us, the four squabbling children now grown to middle age and beyond. Hours ago, we finished a meal of takeout barbecue, collard greens, and corn bread. Dirty plates lie scattered amid beer bottles, half-empty glasses of red wine. In years past, we sometimes played music together, John on his bass, Ronnie at the keyboards, I on the flute or a second piano, David banging any object he could find. Tonight, we are quiet. We are talking of our parents. A tick as the planet of memory hurtles through space.

  “When was it?”

  “I think it was in the early 1990s.”

  “No, earlier. It was 1986, in February, a Saturday night. I wrote it down in my journal.”

  “Do you write everything down?”

  “Not everything.”

  “Were they fighting before it happened?”

  “Yeah. Bekka heard them shouting. She was spending the night.”

  “Shouting. Dad hardly ever shouted. But when he did, he was a volcano erupting, wasn’t he? He told Mother that she made him feel guilty when he wanted time to go sailing. Then he told her that he hadn’t ever been happy with her.”