RE: The Spirit of St. Louis: A Short Story In Five Parts
September 12, 2016 at 11:37 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2016 at 11:37 pm by Mudhammam.)
Part IV
It must have been the end of summer when Mama suggested that the three of us drive to St. Louis to visit her pen pal. Albeit she had shared countless anecdotes about Takeisha and her son, Tyrone, to the extent that I had presumed to know everything that there was to know about them, still, it was fairly shocking the first time that Tyrone and I came face-to-face; I discovered that my half-brother looked exactly like me. Here was another me in the world! The sole difference between us: I'm a Caucasian Selvaggio, and he was a Negro.
What you have to understand about Shawnee County, where I grew up, is that while the whites not unexpectedly prided themselves on their racial openness -- Langston Hughes was practically raised next door! -- nonetheless the off-color remark, the racist joke, these were commonplace. The Negro population was then less than ten percent, and, as much as elsewhere at the time, “separate but equal” remained both the general attitude and policy. Mama, on the other hand, and contrary to the unenlightened herd, routinely expressed her love for all of humanity. “The color of a person,” she used to say, or in Seymour’s case, the shape, “says nothing about one’s character, and it is that which you ought to judge.” Those were the exalted principles that she passed along to me, though, I leave it to you to evaluate her judgment, for Seymour was no cosmopolitan; in spite of Mama’s stern rebuttals which involved the back of her hand caroming off his whale of an arm, he couldn’t help but repeatedly mumble a single question for the entirety of the four and a half hour trip to St. Louis: “Really? A nigger?”
I don’t know what I expected to see when our station wagon reached the city but my impression of St. Louis sank to the same species of disappointment that I had experienced during the first Christmas after my father left. That was when I learned the truth about Santa Claus, that he is really a fat postman named Seymour, and worse, that his intermittent weekend retreats probably involve a popish character known as the Grand Wizard. Probably. The latter was only just now making itself known.
Mama’s paramour lived in an apartment a couple of miles northwest of the MacArthur bridge, in the Desoto-Carr neighborhood. Diogenes and his tub would have passed away into obscurity here. It was a strange feeling because while the scenery encapsulated everything that one might associate with the ills of modern urbanization -- overcrowding, decrepit infrastructure, in a word, filth -- yet there was an aura about the place, a glow in its inhabitant; their faces breathed with life. This was the kind of district from whence Messiahs are bred, where the grumblings of revolt are the most effectively kindled and, more oft than not, hastily stamped out. The bridge, on the other hand, which sat adjacent to our hotel, made for a sort of dull but quaint view. I remember noting that much of it looked depressingly similar to home; nothing but empty lots for at least a mile stretch, for some forty blocks had been utterly demolished the previous year for the construction of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. There was an old cathedral and one or two other buildings left standing, I think. The big plan for the lot was to erect a memorial in honor of the men whose course of empire had taken them Westward, men like my father.
Takeisha shared the second floor of a tenement, built in the nineteenth-century, with her son, brother, and grandmother, and one or two other families, all of whom were among the small handful of residents in the area entitled to their very own communal toilet. I was informed that many families had to devise makeshift lavatories to accommodate the outmoded living conditions. Takeisha’s brother, Tyrese -- was it Tyrese? No. Thomas. Thomas? So many T’s, I’m afraid that his name has slipped my mind. I’ll call him Thomas -- Thomas met us at the door of their lowly domicile, and almost immediately I detected a stench, which I was then not yet fully acquainted with, waft across my nostrils. I became privy to its cause when I met the grandmother, this precious, dilapidated, shriveled up raisin to whom they referred as “Granny Frank.” I don’t know how she acquired that name, for the memorial card that Mama brought home from her funeral ceremony the following year and kept on the shelf next to the radio read “Tasha LaTrice Turner.” At most she said all of about four words the whole of our visit and not once took her suspicious eyes off Seymour and me. What I smelt was her wasting away in her rocking chair as she chain smoked, her dark, bony fingers rolling one cigarette after another.
Thomas seemed like a scholarly fellow, and indeed, was rather well-versed in local politics. His appearance was clean-cut, slacks and a light sweater, had a mild, gentlemanly air. He conversed with his chin slanted downwards, his brow raised, constantly readjusting his glasses which tended towards the tip of his nose, rejoining every utterance spoken to him with an “Uh-huh” and a studious nod. As it turned out, he had worked as a paralegal for George L. Vaughn and was presently active in the Urban League, striving against the intolerable treatment that regularly confronted Negroes when applying for a job, a house, or, as was the case at most department store lunch counters, a goddamn lunch.
You can imagine how well he and Seymour hit it off.
As amiable as Thomas was, I, like Mama, took a greater interest in “Ms. Takeisha,” as I called her then. We followed Thomas into the family room and there I was introduced to Tyrone, my other Negro half; what's more, beside him sat the second most gorgeous dame that I had heretofore chanced to fix my lusty orbs upon. First-place honors, without question, still belonged to the curvaceous prophetess that I had beheld at the Paraclete Revival, the one with the beatific ankles, but it was Ms. Takeisha whom I pictured later on, unwittingly of course, when I lighted upon Descartes’ idées claires et distinctes. Like Mama, her figure was petite, but, unlike the wild gazelles that leapt from the busty prophetess, her chest evoked (to my feral mind) the queer idea of two fawns grazing among the lilies. A complexion that resembled axinite, her plaited cornrows, which she wore in a ponytail, echoed the serpentine locks that flowed from the crown of Medusa, while her eyes glistened with the resplendency of emeralds. Her physiognomy transported me to another realm; I saw at the bow of a majestic ship those protruding cheekbones, gaping upwards, her hands lifted into the air as I led a horde of peasants along the banks of the river Cydnus, a few of the children shouting the name of that vivacious queen, others yelling, “Venus! Venus!” and blowing kisses to those plenteous lips. The allure of her features, straight nose, small chin, the solemnity evinced in her gaze, by Zeus! It is then that I suddenly realize! it hath descended upon me! The drums cease, the cheers and applause come to an abrupt stop. I look up in wonderment at the mother of Egypt’s last Pharaoh and humbly offer her excellency a knee.
Okay, I didn’t actually kneel, and more or less none of that occurred to me at the time, I mean, I was six years old! I know that I felt something, a weakness in my loins, who knows? The point is, I adored Takeisha.
My half-brother and I just kind of stared at one another while the adults engaged in small talk. Eventually the women broke off into a tête-à-tête about single motherhood while the men found themselves in an intense debate over matters of utmost consequence, namely, whether or not the Browns had a strong enough roster to defeat the Cardinals in a hypothetical World Series match-up. Granny Frank sat at the kitchen table and puffed her cigarettes, occasionally moaning the words “Why, God, why.” I don’t know, you tell me. Finally, Ms. Takeisha hinted to Tyrone that he show me his drawings, for all children love to draw. He reluctantly complied and told me to follow him. I waited as he rummaged through a desk in his bedroom; he grabbed a binder and we proceeded into the kitchen, came to a foyer, then exited through a back door which led to a balcony, overhanging a large alley that separated two housing complexes. Below the balcony were some large crates that provided a way down, though the jump from the balcony to the highest crate was a few feet, besides which, I have a natural fear of heights. Tyrone made the leap, slid down to a shorter crate, and settled onto the pavement. “Well, peckerwood,” he called back to me, “are you coming or not?”
There are moments in a man’s life when the decisions set before him, irrespective of present appearances, not only confirm the bent of his personality as it has hitherto tended, but moreover, determine those habits that will comprise his identity from here to eternity; or at all events until a fleshy banquet is made of his putrefying corpse. This wasn’t one of those moments per se, but it was precisely then, as I peered over the balcony from which Tyrone had plunged with the ease of a flying lemur, that I gained an appreciation for the pusillanimity that had plagued my forbearer. I scaled the balustrade and watched as the gap between the soles of my dangling feet and the platform beneath swelled a hundredfold. Five feet, one hundred, to the tension in my nerves, the palpitations that caused my legs to buckle, it made no difference. “The sun stood still, and the moon stayed.” How does one begin an act of courage? I still ask myself, for unless the eldest daughter of Zeus had a role in my downfall, the next course of motion involved my small body cascading towards the stack of crates, upon which I landed; here was genuine spontaneity! Then I performed one or two Olympian somersaults, unwittingly, of course. My subsequent flutter and thump, however, including a face-plant onto a large pile of trash bags that were conveniently situated next to the crates, was pretty straightforward Newtonian physics. Sure, it’s not quite what Kierkegaard had in mind by a leap of faith, but you have to take credit where you can. Meanwhile, the wind had been sucked right out of me. Tyrone, as if my near-death experience was a side-splitting comedy, convulsed in laughter, almost to the point of tears. Indeed, it seemed that I had died, or perhaps fainted, I am not sure which, but I swear that I felt myself transported to the Isles of the Blessed. There was St. Peter, and the Queen of Heaven, and three-hundred-year-old Nestor, oh! And there I saw the oldest man who has ever lived, Noah’s grandfather Methuselah, who informed me that he died a natural death and not in the flood, which relieved me greatly, for I had always found that question difficult to resolve. Then I looked up into the sky and witnessed a bright outline, a halo, surrounding a face made dark and obscure from the intensity of the light. The figure, whom I was certain must be the Son of God, leaned over my risible position and exclaimed: “Christ, you smell like shit!”
Once I recovered from my mishap, and Tyrone from his hysterics, he led me down the alley a short distance, then turned and went through a narrow passageway, which led to a gate. It was a hot Saturday afternoon and I could hear the hustle and bustle of city life as we approached. A group of women strolled by along the sidewalk, gossiping amongst themselves about the price of fresh produce; an elderly gentleman, smoking tobacco underneath the shade of a nearby awning, gossiped amongst himself and his Cocker Spaniel about the women. Beyond the gate was the front of the apartment building, the street where Seymour had parked the station wagon, and, crossing over to the other side after wandering north for two or three furlongs, we finally arrived at our destination: a ditch wherein was the mouth of a huge drainage pipe that ran beneath the road. At the entrance of the murky tunnel, which no longer seemed operative, was a flat patch of dirt upon which sat a milk crate, an empty can of paint, cigarette butts, and some other trash. I was invited to take a seat, so I plopped onto the paint can.
Everything that Tyrone talked about was prefaced or appended with the words “My Uncle Tom says” or “That’s what my Uncle Tom told me.” I was given the sense that he felt a profound reverence for his Uncle Tom. When I queried him about his drawings, his tone, until then flippant, suddenly became grave, his voice wobbly; the pomposity in his demeanor was brought low. He handed me the binder, muttering that his uncle had bought it for his sixth birthday the preceding May; I replied that I had turned six in July. I unzipped it and out fell a collection of magazine clippings, cutouts of naked women, though I remember that one damsel sported satin opera gloves, a lovely brassiere, and lace stockings fastened to a garter belt; another was a photograph, captured in the style that made Bruce Mozert famous, of a mermaid swimming in the nude, one-half of a breast covered by a frolicking sea lion. Those were the gals that stuck with me anyway. Red in the cheeks, Tyrone hastily retrieved his pin-up models from the soil and shoved them into his pockets, proceeding to act as if nothing had happened. Neither of us mentioned it again.
I should preface the following by stating that Tyrone’s creative genius was, in a nutshell, unconventional. The first illustration that I came across was a bald man, strapped into a chair, smitten with terror. Also, he was lacking arms and seemed to be gurgling his own blood while a billowing conflagration engulfed his pasty head, liquefying the defenseless chap’s wrinkled visage as if it were made of wax. A tad eccentric, aye? In addition to that, melted flesh trickled down the limbless torso like pancake syrup, forming a puddle of goo around a severed appendage that lay close-at-hand. How is one to respond to such a thing? I looked at my half-brother with a nervous smirk but he merely stared at the ground, restlessly tapping his foot, failing to espy my alarm. The second picture wasn't so bad. It depicted a crowd, of men, women, and children, their eyes alight with panic, a girl’s palm covering her trembling lip, a father clutching his frightful son, each pointing upwards; there he had sketched a plane, with a single wing, nosediving towards the earth. “He's an artist is all,” I quietly repeated to myself, once again scanning my deranged sibling, judging a peculiar vibe in his movements as he ran his fingers over his woolly scalp and sighed, continuing to ignore my glances. As I flipped the page I admit that my stomach began to churn a little. Here I found a wrecked plane, entangled in the throng of bystanders, or rather, a sea of body parts; arms, legs, eyeballs, some oozing blood, others squirting it profusely, a few decapitated heads, and plenty of flames, roasting the bits and pieces of human meat splattered about, colored the gruesome scene. If I were to judge the work strictly on merit, everything was superbly drawn; the way he varied the hues, his use of shading, such detail! All of it, to speak objectively, really made the gore come alive. To speak otherwise, I thought I might hurl, for I knew not what else to make of the disturbing representations. I turned to him, searching for a sincere, congratulatory word. Before I was able to speak, however, he burst out crying. Then, snatching the binder from my lap, he darted off.
I didn’t budge from the paint can until some time had passed, watching as the mood of the day became melancholic and overcast, trying to process the events that had just transpired. The brutality of the human experience had never before presented itself to my imagination and I adjudicated this newfangled cognizance to be altogether farcical. Obviously, I was aware of the arrant barbarisms heaped upon the dramatis personae in the stories that Mama read, tragedies such as befell the grief-stricken Iphigenia, when Agamemnon, desperately attempting to solicit assistance for the uncertain trials that he and his fellow wayfarers were promised to come up against, offered her as aparchai to the gods; more or less the same fate, and to the same purpose, that St. Paul instructed the later Greeks concerning the wise and morose Jesus. And, undoubtedly, I knew about the misfortunes that had afflicted Job, or the adversity of those forlorn sailors that Polyphemus had hungrily gobbled down; the genocide of the Canaanites and Amalekites by the Israelites, albeit for the greater good, not to mention the broadcasts about the current war that Mama and I devoured most afternoons. But these portraits of death had never departed from the analytical side of my brain. At that instant everything became clear, not the muted reality of annihilation, for I still believed in that fabulous kingdom described for the young and vulgar by God’s servant, John of Patmos, paved in “pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” fortified “with all manner of precious stones”; nay more, I started to perceive the absolute necessity of nature to disperse and reassemble, the fact that the phoenix which always rises from the ashes of the dead, born anew, sometimes takes the matter and form of an Einstein, sometimes a Selvaggio. It was also at this same instant that a scraggly rat emerged from the drainage pipe, waltzing up to me and halting as he drew his tiny head as if to study my countenance. Yes, I pondered, the phoenix is even frequently reborn an ignoble city rat. How lucky I am!
“First, that I was born a human being and not one of the brutes; next, that I was born a man and not a woman.”
We looked fixedly at one another and a surge of tenderness and pity shot through my veins. It was as though a feeling of fraternity had assailed upon the two doleful varmints, the lonely rat and the kid from Kansas who was rapidly blossoming into an unremarkable troglodyte. Subsequently, and seemingly out of nowhere, a raptor swooped down from the sky and plucked my helpless friend from the dirt, soaring away as the critter squeaked his final cry, then “bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.” Before I was able to speak, I also burst out crying, speeding off to Mama as fast as my hurried strides could advance.
Upon my return to the tenement, by which point I had disguised all evidence of my previous sobs, I found Seymour and Thomas setting the kitchen table, discussing the role of the Rothschild family in the Napoleonic wars. The latter was aghast to find himself entertaining a conspiratorial anti-Semite in his home, Seymour insisting that, though he could tolerate “the good ones, like the Apostles, or Jack Benny,” most Jews were “dishonest, hook-beaked, usurers,” responsible not only for “murdering the Savior of mankind” but “the New Deal too.” FDR, he contended, was secretly a Zionist. Thomas objected vigorously, arguing that such narrow-mindedness synopsized everything that was wrong with the human species.
“Uh-huh,” he said, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Your approach to this topic, sir, if I may be excused to say so, reveals nothing but a horrendous display of ignorance, a tribalism, which, to be frank, has produced in your simplistic understanding of the world some astoundingly stupid prejudices. You blame the Jews when it is the white man who has colonized and raped the wealth of his indigenous neighbors! It is the white man who has enslaved and disenfranchised the Negro, stripping away his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, by God Almighty! throwing my people in chains, ghettos, and prisons! The white man, not the devil, masquerades as an angel of light!”
Seymour raised his index finger, as stout as a wurst, and interjected, “Nonsense! Who brought iron tools to America? The white man! Who taught the savage Christianity, the one and only true religion?”
Thomas nodded and murmured, “And certainly the latter used the former to great effect.”
“The white man!” Seymour rejoined. “Who introduced chocolate to Europe? Chocolate, I say!”
“Uh-huh, yes, sir, and syphilis.”
“What’s syphilis?” I asked.
“It’s like chickenpox,” replied Seymour.
Meanwhile, Mama and Ms. Takeisha began to set the food out, my eyes and nostrils consuming every parcel of the viands placed before me. First they brought out honey-glazed ham and broiled fish, then buttered crumpets and sesame-cakes, rounding it off with a variety of cheeses, dried dates, fig leaves, and purple grapes; at the center of it all was a steaming roast. Oh! how my tongue wept with elation!
“Did Tyrone show you his drawings?” Ms. Takeisha asked me, smiling as she wiped her soft hands on her apron. Stuttering, I answered in the affirmative. “The therapist says that it is healthy for him to have an outlet, to channel his emotions rather than bottle them up. He is very insecure about himself. Why, he even refuses to let me see what he’s been working on lately, Thomas too! The only other person he shares them with is Granny Frank.”
“Why, God, why,” she grumbled, casting an eye upon me.
“Therapy?” questioned Mama.
“He’s been going ever since the accident last month. I wrote to you about what happened when Thomas took him to Lambert Field, right?”
Mama indicated that she had while Seymour and I exchanged confused looks.
“God! It was horrible! I can’t--”
“We went to see the first public demonstration of the Waco CG-4,” Thomas continued, “it’s a cargo glider that the military uses. Our mayor was there, onboard I mean, Mayor Becker, several other bigwigs in the city, the chamber of commerce president, the county chief executive, and William Robertson.”
“Who?” asked Seymour.
“William Robertson, it was his company that manufactured the glider. He’s well-known in aviation circles, in fact, he also contributed money to the construction of Lindbergh’s plane.”
“The Spirit of St. Louis!” I blurted out, complimenting myself that I had been able to make a valuable contribution to the discourse.
“Uh-huh, that’s correct. Anyway, the flight was carrying nine, ten people, and, forthwith after being released from the tow plane, its right wing broke off, causing it to plummet fifteen-hundred feet, give or take. At first, everybody thought it was a stunt, but alas, all ten souls perished. The mayor, the president, Mr. Robertson, all gone.”
“How tragic!” cried Mama.
“Since then Tyrone just hasn’t been himself.”
“On that note,” Seymour added, segueing the conversation as Tyrone entered the kitchen, “I’m famished! Shall we eat?”
Part V
That was the gist of our trip to St. Louis as it comes back to mind. As you will discover in due course, Takeisha and Tyrone played a crucial part in the early stages of my education, on which note, I was to start first grade on the Monday following our weekend excursion in the city. I could hardly contain my excitement! There is one other memory that now returns; our stay at the hotel that night, I recollect that it was the first time I ever observed Seymour drunk, though I would come to attest to this practice, and Mama’s disapprobation, on many occasions afterward. There were two beds in the room, one for me and Mama, and one for Seymour; even still I see the big oaf slouched on his pillows, guzzling a bottle, bottoms up, Mama sitting next to me under our blankets, reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”
Lilies! I mused on Ms. Takeisha’s irreproachable fawns and beamed with contentment until the lamentable image of those ghastly slums in which so many, including my squalid companion from the ditch, were forced to live, soured my tantalizing reverie. I interrupted Mama’s narration and inquired about the less fortunate of God's creatures among us.
“Rats? What about them?”
“Yes,” I said, conjuring up the sight of that poor critter trapped in the claws of its ravenous predator, “mice and rats, for how else does God feedeth the fowl? Might not they add one cubit by attending to their well-being?”
Seymour leaned over to respond. He stared at me and then, proceeding to belch, let out one of his infamous guffaws.
It must have been the end of summer when Mama suggested that the three of us drive to St. Louis to visit her pen pal. Albeit she had shared countless anecdotes about Takeisha and her son, Tyrone, to the extent that I had presumed to know everything that there was to know about them, still, it was fairly shocking the first time that Tyrone and I came face-to-face; I discovered that my half-brother looked exactly like me. Here was another me in the world! The sole difference between us: I'm a Caucasian Selvaggio, and he was a Negro.
What you have to understand about Shawnee County, where I grew up, is that while the whites not unexpectedly prided themselves on their racial openness -- Langston Hughes was practically raised next door! -- nonetheless the off-color remark, the racist joke, these were commonplace. The Negro population was then less than ten percent, and, as much as elsewhere at the time, “separate but equal” remained both the general attitude and policy. Mama, on the other hand, and contrary to the unenlightened herd, routinely expressed her love for all of humanity. “The color of a person,” she used to say, or in Seymour’s case, the shape, “says nothing about one’s character, and it is that which you ought to judge.” Those were the exalted principles that she passed along to me, though, I leave it to you to evaluate her judgment, for Seymour was no cosmopolitan; in spite of Mama’s stern rebuttals which involved the back of her hand caroming off his whale of an arm, he couldn’t help but repeatedly mumble a single question for the entirety of the four and a half hour trip to St. Louis: “Really? A nigger?”
I don’t know what I expected to see when our station wagon reached the city but my impression of St. Louis sank to the same species of disappointment that I had experienced during the first Christmas after my father left. That was when I learned the truth about Santa Claus, that he is really a fat postman named Seymour, and worse, that his intermittent weekend retreats probably involve a popish character known as the Grand Wizard. Probably. The latter was only just now making itself known.
Mama’s paramour lived in an apartment a couple of miles northwest of the MacArthur bridge, in the Desoto-Carr neighborhood. Diogenes and his tub would have passed away into obscurity here. It was a strange feeling because while the scenery encapsulated everything that one might associate with the ills of modern urbanization -- overcrowding, decrepit infrastructure, in a word, filth -- yet there was an aura about the place, a glow in its inhabitant; their faces breathed with life. This was the kind of district from whence Messiahs are bred, where the grumblings of revolt are the most effectively kindled and, more oft than not, hastily stamped out. The bridge, on the other hand, which sat adjacent to our hotel, made for a sort of dull but quaint view. I remember noting that much of it looked depressingly similar to home; nothing but empty lots for at least a mile stretch, for some forty blocks had been utterly demolished the previous year for the construction of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. There was an old cathedral and one or two other buildings left standing, I think. The big plan for the lot was to erect a memorial in honor of the men whose course of empire had taken them Westward, men like my father.
Takeisha shared the second floor of a tenement, built in the nineteenth-century, with her son, brother, and grandmother, and one or two other families, all of whom were among the small handful of residents in the area entitled to their very own communal toilet. I was informed that many families had to devise makeshift lavatories to accommodate the outmoded living conditions. Takeisha’s brother, Tyrese -- was it Tyrese? No. Thomas. Thomas? So many T’s, I’m afraid that his name has slipped my mind. I’ll call him Thomas -- Thomas met us at the door of their lowly domicile, and almost immediately I detected a stench, which I was then not yet fully acquainted with, waft across my nostrils. I became privy to its cause when I met the grandmother, this precious, dilapidated, shriveled up raisin to whom they referred as “Granny Frank.” I don’t know how she acquired that name, for the memorial card that Mama brought home from her funeral ceremony the following year and kept on the shelf next to the radio read “Tasha LaTrice Turner.” At most she said all of about four words the whole of our visit and not once took her suspicious eyes off Seymour and me. What I smelt was her wasting away in her rocking chair as she chain smoked, her dark, bony fingers rolling one cigarette after another.
Thomas seemed like a scholarly fellow, and indeed, was rather well-versed in local politics. His appearance was clean-cut, slacks and a light sweater, had a mild, gentlemanly air. He conversed with his chin slanted downwards, his brow raised, constantly readjusting his glasses which tended towards the tip of his nose, rejoining every utterance spoken to him with an “Uh-huh” and a studious nod. As it turned out, he had worked as a paralegal for George L. Vaughn and was presently active in the Urban League, striving against the intolerable treatment that regularly confronted Negroes when applying for a job, a house, or, as was the case at most department store lunch counters, a goddamn lunch.
You can imagine how well he and Seymour hit it off.
As amiable as Thomas was, I, like Mama, took a greater interest in “Ms. Takeisha,” as I called her then. We followed Thomas into the family room and there I was introduced to Tyrone, my other Negro half; what's more, beside him sat the second most gorgeous dame that I had heretofore chanced to fix my lusty orbs upon. First-place honors, without question, still belonged to the curvaceous prophetess that I had beheld at the Paraclete Revival, the one with the beatific ankles, but it was Ms. Takeisha whom I pictured later on, unwittingly of course, when I lighted upon Descartes’ idées claires et distinctes. Like Mama, her figure was petite, but, unlike the wild gazelles that leapt from the busty prophetess, her chest evoked (to my feral mind) the queer idea of two fawns grazing among the lilies. A complexion that resembled axinite, her plaited cornrows, which she wore in a ponytail, echoed the serpentine locks that flowed from the crown of Medusa, while her eyes glistened with the resplendency of emeralds. Her physiognomy transported me to another realm; I saw at the bow of a majestic ship those protruding cheekbones, gaping upwards, her hands lifted into the air as I led a horde of peasants along the banks of the river Cydnus, a few of the children shouting the name of that vivacious queen, others yelling, “Venus! Venus!” and blowing kisses to those plenteous lips. The allure of her features, straight nose, small chin, the solemnity evinced in her gaze, by Zeus! It is then that I suddenly realize! it hath descended upon me! The drums cease, the cheers and applause come to an abrupt stop. I look up in wonderment at the mother of Egypt’s last Pharaoh and humbly offer her excellency a knee.
Okay, I didn’t actually kneel, and more or less none of that occurred to me at the time, I mean, I was six years old! I know that I felt something, a weakness in my loins, who knows? The point is, I adored Takeisha.
My half-brother and I just kind of stared at one another while the adults engaged in small talk. Eventually the women broke off into a tête-à-tête about single motherhood while the men found themselves in an intense debate over matters of utmost consequence, namely, whether or not the Browns had a strong enough roster to defeat the Cardinals in a hypothetical World Series match-up. Granny Frank sat at the kitchen table and puffed her cigarettes, occasionally moaning the words “Why, God, why.” I don’t know, you tell me. Finally, Ms. Takeisha hinted to Tyrone that he show me his drawings, for all children love to draw. He reluctantly complied and told me to follow him. I waited as he rummaged through a desk in his bedroom; he grabbed a binder and we proceeded into the kitchen, came to a foyer, then exited through a back door which led to a balcony, overhanging a large alley that separated two housing complexes. Below the balcony were some large crates that provided a way down, though the jump from the balcony to the highest crate was a few feet, besides which, I have a natural fear of heights. Tyrone made the leap, slid down to a shorter crate, and settled onto the pavement. “Well, peckerwood,” he called back to me, “are you coming or not?”
There are moments in a man’s life when the decisions set before him, irrespective of present appearances, not only confirm the bent of his personality as it has hitherto tended, but moreover, determine those habits that will comprise his identity from here to eternity; or at all events until a fleshy banquet is made of his putrefying corpse. This wasn’t one of those moments per se, but it was precisely then, as I peered over the balcony from which Tyrone had plunged with the ease of a flying lemur, that I gained an appreciation for the pusillanimity that had plagued my forbearer. I scaled the balustrade and watched as the gap between the soles of my dangling feet and the platform beneath swelled a hundredfold. Five feet, one hundred, to the tension in my nerves, the palpitations that caused my legs to buckle, it made no difference. “The sun stood still, and the moon stayed.” How does one begin an act of courage? I still ask myself, for unless the eldest daughter of Zeus had a role in my downfall, the next course of motion involved my small body cascading towards the stack of crates, upon which I landed; here was genuine spontaneity! Then I performed one or two Olympian somersaults, unwittingly, of course. My subsequent flutter and thump, however, including a face-plant onto a large pile of trash bags that were conveniently situated next to the crates, was pretty straightforward Newtonian physics. Sure, it’s not quite what Kierkegaard had in mind by a leap of faith, but you have to take credit where you can. Meanwhile, the wind had been sucked right out of me. Tyrone, as if my near-death experience was a side-splitting comedy, convulsed in laughter, almost to the point of tears. Indeed, it seemed that I had died, or perhaps fainted, I am not sure which, but I swear that I felt myself transported to the Isles of the Blessed. There was St. Peter, and the Queen of Heaven, and three-hundred-year-old Nestor, oh! And there I saw the oldest man who has ever lived, Noah’s grandfather Methuselah, who informed me that he died a natural death and not in the flood, which relieved me greatly, for I had always found that question difficult to resolve. Then I looked up into the sky and witnessed a bright outline, a halo, surrounding a face made dark and obscure from the intensity of the light. The figure, whom I was certain must be the Son of God, leaned over my risible position and exclaimed: “Christ, you smell like shit!”
Once I recovered from my mishap, and Tyrone from his hysterics, he led me down the alley a short distance, then turned and went through a narrow passageway, which led to a gate. It was a hot Saturday afternoon and I could hear the hustle and bustle of city life as we approached. A group of women strolled by along the sidewalk, gossiping amongst themselves about the price of fresh produce; an elderly gentleman, smoking tobacco underneath the shade of a nearby awning, gossiped amongst himself and his Cocker Spaniel about the women. Beyond the gate was the front of the apartment building, the street where Seymour had parked the station wagon, and, crossing over to the other side after wandering north for two or three furlongs, we finally arrived at our destination: a ditch wherein was the mouth of a huge drainage pipe that ran beneath the road. At the entrance of the murky tunnel, which no longer seemed operative, was a flat patch of dirt upon which sat a milk crate, an empty can of paint, cigarette butts, and some other trash. I was invited to take a seat, so I plopped onto the paint can.
Everything that Tyrone talked about was prefaced or appended with the words “My Uncle Tom says” or “That’s what my Uncle Tom told me.” I was given the sense that he felt a profound reverence for his Uncle Tom. When I queried him about his drawings, his tone, until then flippant, suddenly became grave, his voice wobbly; the pomposity in his demeanor was brought low. He handed me the binder, muttering that his uncle had bought it for his sixth birthday the preceding May; I replied that I had turned six in July. I unzipped it and out fell a collection of magazine clippings, cutouts of naked women, though I remember that one damsel sported satin opera gloves, a lovely brassiere, and lace stockings fastened to a garter belt; another was a photograph, captured in the style that made Bruce Mozert famous, of a mermaid swimming in the nude, one-half of a breast covered by a frolicking sea lion. Those were the gals that stuck with me anyway. Red in the cheeks, Tyrone hastily retrieved his pin-up models from the soil and shoved them into his pockets, proceeding to act as if nothing had happened. Neither of us mentioned it again.
I should preface the following by stating that Tyrone’s creative genius was, in a nutshell, unconventional. The first illustration that I came across was a bald man, strapped into a chair, smitten with terror. Also, he was lacking arms and seemed to be gurgling his own blood while a billowing conflagration engulfed his pasty head, liquefying the defenseless chap’s wrinkled visage as if it were made of wax. A tad eccentric, aye? In addition to that, melted flesh trickled down the limbless torso like pancake syrup, forming a puddle of goo around a severed appendage that lay close-at-hand. How is one to respond to such a thing? I looked at my half-brother with a nervous smirk but he merely stared at the ground, restlessly tapping his foot, failing to espy my alarm. The second picture wasn't so bad. It depicted a crowd, of men, women, and children, their eyes alight with panic, a girl’s palm covering her trembling lip, a father clutching his frightful son, each pointing upwards; there he had sketched a plane, with a single wing, nosediving towards the earth. “He's an artist is all,” I quietly repeated to myself, once again scanning my deranged sibling, judging a peculiar vibe in his movements as he ran his fingers over his woolly scalp and sighed, continuing to ignore my glances. As I flipped the page I admit that my stomach began to churn a little. Here I found a wrecked plane, entangled in the throng of bystanders, or rather, a sea of body parts; arms, legs, eyeballs, some oozing blood, others squirting it profusely, a few decapitated heads, and plenty of flames, roasting the bits and pieces of human meat splattered about, colored the gruesome scene. If I were to judge the work strictly on merit, everything was superbly drawn; the way he varied the hues, his use of shading, such detail! All of it, to speak objectively, really made the gore come alive. To speak otherwise, I thought I might hurl, for I knew not what else to make of the disturbing representations. I turned to him, searching for a sincere, congratulatory word. Before I was able to speak, however, he burst out crying. Then, snatching the binder from my lap, he darted off.
I didn’t budge from the paint can until some time had passed, watching as the mood of the day became melancholic and overcast, trying to process the events that had just transpired. The brutality of the human experience had never before presented itself to my imagination and I adjudicated this newfangled cognizance to be altogether farcical. Obviously, I was aware of the arrant barbarisms heaped upon the dramatis personae in the stories that Mama read, tragedies such as befell the grief-stricken Iphigenia, when Agamemnon, desperately attempting to solicit assistance for the uncertain trials that he and his fellow wayfarers were promised to come up against, offered her as aparchai to the gods; more or less the same fate, and to the same purpose, that St. Paul instructed the later Greeks concerning the wise and morose Jesus. And, undoubtedly, I knew about the misfortunes that had afflicted Job, or the adversity of those forlorn sailors that Polyphemus had hungrily gobbled down; the genocide of the Canaanites and Amalekites by the Israelites, albeit for the greater good, not to mention the broadcasts about the current war that Mama and I devoured most afternoons. But these portraits of death had never departed from the analytical side of my brain. At that instant everything became clear, not the muted reality of annihilation, for I still believed in that fabulous kingdom described for the young and vulgar by God’s servant, John of Patmos, paved in “pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” fortified “with all manner of precious stones”; nay more, I started to perceive the absolute necessity of nature to disperse and reassemble, the fact that the phoenix which always rises from the ashes of the dead, born anew, sometimes takes the matter and form of an Einstein, sometimes a Selvaggio. It was also at this same instant that a scraggly rat emerged from the drainage pipe, waltzing up to me and halting as he drew his tiny head as if to study my countenance. Yes, I pondered, the phoenix is even frequently reborn an ignoble city rat. How lucky I am!
“First, that I was born a human being and not one of the brutes; next, that I was born a man and not a woman.”
We looked fixedly at one another and a surge of tenderness and pity shot through my veins. It was as though a feeling of fraternity had assailed upon the two doleful varmints, the lonely rat and the kid from Kansas who was rapidly blossoming into an unremarkable troglodyte. Subsequently, and seemingly out of nowhere, a raptor swooped down from the sky and plucked my helpless friend from the dirt, soaring away as the critter squeaked his final cry, then “bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.” Before I was able to speak, I also burst out crying, speeding off to Mama as fast as my hurried strides could advance.
Upon my return to the tenement, by which point I had disguised all evidence of my previous sobs, I found Seymour and Thomas setting the kitchen table, discussing the role of the Rothschild family in the Napoleonic wars. The latter was aghast to find himself entertaining a conspiratorial anti-Semite in his home, Seymour insisting that, though he could tolerate “the good ones, like the Apostles, or Jack Benny,” most Jews were “dishonest, hook-beaked, usurers,” responsible not only for “murdering the Savior of mankind” but “the New Deal too.” FDR, he contended, was secretly a Zionist. Thomas objected vigorously, arguing that such narrow-mindedness synopsized everything that was wrong with the human species.
“Uh-huh,” he said, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Your approach to this topic, sir, if I may be excused to say so, reveals nothing but a horrendous display of ignorance, a tribalism, which, to be frank, has produced in your simplistic understanding of the world some astoundingly stupid prejudices. You blame the Jews when it is the white man who has colonized and raped the wealth of his indigenous neighbors! It is the white man who has enslaved and disenfranchised the Negro, stripping away his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, by God Almighty! throwing my people in chains, ghettos, and prisons! The white man, not the devil, masquerades as an angel of light!”
Seymour raised his index finger, as stout as a wurst, and interjected, “Nonsense! Who brought iron tools to America? The white man! Who taught the savage Christianity, the one and only true religion?”
Thomas nodded and murmured, “And certainly the latter used the former to great effect.”
“The white man!” Seymour rejoined. “Who introduced chocolate to Europe? Chocolate, I say!”
“Uh-huh, yes, sir, and syphilis.”
“What’s syphilis?” I asked.
“It’s like chickenpox,” replied Seymour.
Meanwhile, Mama and Ms. Takeisha began to set the food out, my eyes and nostrils consuming every parcel of the viands placed before me. First they brought out honey-glazed ham and broiled fish, then buttered crumpets and sesame-cakes, rounding it off with a variety of cheeses, dried dates, fig leaves, and purple grapes; at the center of it all was a steaming roast. Oh! how my tongue wept with elation!
“Did Tyrone show you his drawings?” Ms. Takeisha asked me, smiling as she wiped her soft hands on her apron. Stuttering, I answered in the affirmative. “The therapist says that it is healthy for him to have an outlet, to channel his emotions rather than bottle them up. He is very insecure about himself. Why, he even refuses to let me see what he’s been working on lately, Thomas too! The only other person he shares them with is Granny Frank.”
“Why, God, why,” she grumbled, casting an eye upon me.
“Therapy?” questioned Mama.
“He’s been going ever since the accident last month. I wrote to you about what happened when Thomas took him to Lambert Field, right?”
Mama indicated that she had while Seymour and I exchanged confused looks.
“God! It was horrible! I can’t--”
“We went to see the first public demonstration of the Waco CG-4,” Thomas continued, “it’s a cargo glider that the military uses. Our mayor was there, onboard I mean, Mayor Becker, several other bigwigs in the city, the chamber of commerce president, the county chief executive, and William Robertson.”
“Who?” asked Seymour.
“William Robertson, it was his company that manufactured the glider. He’s well-known in aviation circles, in fact, he also contributed money to the construction of Lindbergh’s plane.”
“The Spirit of St. Louis!” I blurted out, complimenting myself that I had been able to make a valuable contribution to the discourse.
“Uh-huh, that’s correct. Anyway, the flight was carrying nine, ten people, and, forthwith after being released from the tow plane, its right wing broke off, causing it to plummet fifteen-hundred feet, give or take. At first, everybody thought it was a stunt, but alas, all ten souls perished. The mayor, the president, Mr. Robertson, all gone.”
“How tragic!” cried Mama.
“Since then Tyrone just hasn’t been himself.”
“On that note,” Seymour added, segueing the conversation as Tyrone entered the kitchen, “I’m famished! Shall we eat?”
Part V
That was the gist of our trip to St. Louis as it comes back to mind. As you will discover in due course, Takeisha and Tyrone played a crucial part in the early stages of my education, on which note, I was to start first grade on the Monday following our weekend excursion in the city. I could hardly contain my excitement! There is one other memory that now returns; our stay at the hotel that night, I recollect that it was the first time I ever observed Seymour drunk, though I would come to attest to this practice, and Mama’s disapprobation, on many occasions afterward. There were two beds in the room, one for me and Mama, and one for Seymour; even still I see the big oaf slouched on his pillows, guzzling a bottle, bottoms up, Mama sitting next to me under our blankets, reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”
Lilies! I mused on Ms. Takeisha’s irreproachable fawns and beamed with contentment until the lamentable image of those ghastly slums in which so many, including my squalid companion from the ditch, were forced to live, soured my tantalizing reverie. I interrupted Mama’s narration and inquired about the less fortunate of God's creatures among us.
“Rats? What about them?”
“Yes,” I said, conjuring up the sight of that poor critter trapped in the claws of its ravenous predator, “mice and rats, for how else does God feedeth the fowl? Might not they add one cubit by attending to their well-being?”
Seymour leaned over to respond. He stared at me and then, proceeding to belch, let out one of his infamous guffaws.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
