In Love and Trouble (11 page)

The gorilla began to grunt and rake his blunt claws against the ground. The boy watched him with eyes shining with great pride. He turned away as the gorilla sat up and began picking at his coat, and proceeded to gather small twigs and moss with which to start a fire.

The gorilla sat upright, grumpily watching and picking at his hide, his bleary eyes clearing gradually like the sky. He sniffed the air, looked around him at the forest, looked in stupid bewilderment at the open sky which extended on and on in blueness the farther back he reared his head. He rolled his giant head round on his neck as if chasing away the remains of a headache. He pressed lightly against the place on his buttocks where the big hypo had gone in. He grunted loudly and impatiently. He was hungry.

The boy went about building the fire with slow ritualistic movements, his black hands caressing the wood, the leaves, his warm breath moving the fine feathery dryness of the moss. His wide bottom lip hung open in concentration. From time to time he looked up at the gorilla and smiled burstingly in suppressed jubilation.

Soon the small fire was blazing. The boy sat back from it and looked at the gorilla. He smiled. The gorilla grunted. He turned distrustingly away from the fire, then turned back to it as the boy went over to the bush, took the bag with the bread in it and walked back toward the fire. The gorilla began to fret and strain against his rope. He smelled the bread as it came from the wrapper and made a move toward it. The rope drew him up short.

“Just you wait a minute, you,” the boy said softly, and gingerly held the bread over the flame. In a second he leaped up as if he had forgotten something important. He put the bread down and untied the gorilla. He led him to the shallow rise overlooking the fire and gently pushed him down. The gorilla, as if still doped and continually wringing his head on his neck, sat tamely. The boy resumed his toasting of the bread. As each piece of bread was thoroughly blackened he dropped it into the flames. Then, as the bread burned, he bowed all the way down to the ground in front of the gorilla, who sat like a hairy mystified Buddha on the shallow ledge, his greedy eyes wide in awe of the flames. Each time the boy took out a new piece of bread from the bag and the odor of rye reached him the gorilla made a move forward, slowly and hopelessly, like a turtle. The boy kept toasting the bread, then dropping it in the fire, then bowing his head to the ground. The gorilla watched. The boy mumbled all the while. When he got to the last piece of bread he halted in his prayers and reached behind him for the wine. He opened the bottle and the scent, like roses and vinegar, wafted up in the air and reached the gorilla, who became thoroughly awake for the first time. The boy bowed his dark woolly head to the ground once more, mumble, mumble, mumble, then toasted the endpiece of bread. Then, holding the bread in his hand, burned to a crisp, he poured the half-bottle of wine into the fire. The gorilla, who had watched everything as if spellbound, gave a gruff howl of fierce disapproval.

With his back to the sodden embers the boy bowed on his knees, still mumbling his long fervent prayer. On his knees he dragged his body up to the gorilla’s feet. The gorilla’s feet were black and rough like his own, with long scaly toes and straight silken hair on top that was not like his. Reverently, he lay the burnt offering at the feet of his savage idol. And the gorilla’s feet, powerful and large and twitching with impatience, were the last things he saw before he was hurled out of the violent jungle of the world into nothingness and a blinding light. And the gorilla, snorting with disgust, grabbed the bread.

2

The life of John’s father, another place, ending.

John’s father had heard that in that last miserable second your whole life passed before your eyes.
But he and the plain black girl who was his second wife moved into the moment itself with few reflections to spare. When they heard the twister coming, like twenty wild trains slamming through the houses on their block, she grabbed the baby and he the small boy and hardly noticing that the other moved each ran toward the refrigerator, frantically pulling out the meager dishes of food, flinging a half-empty carton of milk across the room, and making a place where the vegetables and fruits should have been for the two children to crouch. With no tears, no warnings, no good-byes, they slammed the door.

Minutes after the cyclone had leveled the street to the ground searchers would come and find the children still huddled inside the refrigerator. Almost dead, cold, the baby crying and gasping for air, the small boy numb with horror and with chill. They would peer out not into the familiar shabby kitchen but into an open field. Perhaps the church or the Red Cross or a kind neighbor would take them in, bed them down among other children similarly lost, and in twenty years the plain black girl and the man who was their father would be forgotten, recalled, if even briefly, by sudden forceful enclosures in damp and chilly places.

This, too, the future, passed before his eyes, and not one past life but two. He wondered, in that moment, only fleetingly of the God he’d sworn to serve and of the wife he held now in his arms, and thought instead of his first wife, the librarian, and of their son, John.

He had married his first wife in a gigantic two-ring ceremony, in a church, and his wife had had the wedding pictures touched up so that he did not resemble himself. In the pictures his skin was olive brown and smooth when in fact it was black and stubbly and rough. He had married his wife because she was light and loose and fun and because she had long red hair. After they were married she stopped dyeing it and let it grow out black. Then, with the black unimaginative hair and the discreet black patent-leather shoes she wore, the gray suits she seemed to love, the continual poking into books—well, she was just no longer anyone he recognized.

After he quit the post office he became a hairdresser. He liked being around women. Old women with three chins who wanted blue or purple hair, young tacky girls who adored the way platinum sparkled against black skin, even stolid reserved librarians like his wife who never seemed to want anything but a continuation of the way they were. Women like his wife intrigued him because the duller he could make them look the more respectable they felt, and the better they liked it.

But living with his wife was more difficult than straightening her hair every two weeks. He could conquer the kinks in her hair but her body and mind became rapidly harder to penetrate. He found the struggle humiliating besides.

John, unfortunately, had been too small to hold his interest. Which was not to acknowledge lack of love, simply lack of interest.

The plain black girl he married next was a sister in the Nation and would not agree to go away with him except to some forsaken place where they could preach the Word to those of their people who had formerly floundered without it. He too changed his name and took an X. He was not comfortable with the X, however, because he began to feel each morning that the day before he had not existed. When his anxiety did not subside his wife claimed an inability to comprehend the persistent stubbornness of his agony. He knew what it was, of course; without a last name John would never be able to find him.

He had seen the boy once in ten years, when John was almost fifteen years old. He had been eager to talk to John, eager to please. John was eager to get away from him. Not from dislike or out of anger, that was clear. John did not blame his father for deserting him, at least that is what he said. No, John simply wanted to get up to the Bronx Zoo before it closed.

“John, I don’t understand!” he had shouted, annoyed to find himself in competition with a zoo. His son watched his lips move with a curious interest, as if he could not possibly hear the words coming out. John looked at his father with impatience and pity, and with an expression faintly contemptuous, superior. It unnerved him, for it was the way John himself had been looked at when he was a baby. For John had all the physical characteristics that in the Western world are scorned. John looked like his father. An honest black. His forehead sloped backward from the bridge of his eyes. His nose was flat, his mouth too wide. John’s mother was always fussing over John but hated him because he looked like his father instead of like her. She blamed her husband for what he had “done to” John. Yet he was John’s father, why shouldn’t the boy resemble him?

His new wife loved him fiercely, with a kind of passionate abstraction, as if he were a painting or wondrous sculpture. She wore his color and the construction of his features like a badge. She saw him as a king returning to his lands and was bitterly proud of whatever their two bodies produced.

In the South, in a hate-filled state complete with magnolias, tornadoes and broken-tongued field hands, they had settled down to raise a family of their own. The minds of their people were as harsh and flat as the land and had little time to absorb a new religion more dangerous than the old. Still, they had persisted; and in the struggle he found peace for himself. It was true that he was lost to John, but through the years his wife helped him see that John was really just a cipher, one of the millions who needed the truth their religion could bring. He had finally accepted himself, but it seemed that in the moment the beauty of this acceptance was most clear he must say good-bye to it.

A sound like twenty wild trains rushed through the street. They moved as one person will move, their children in their arms, toward the refrigerator. They threw out the food, crammed the children in. They slammed the refrigerator door and rushed, like children themselves, into each other’s arms.

3

The mother of John, searching …

Of course John’s mother was much older than the other black radical poets.
She was in her forties and most of them were in their twenties or early thirties. She looked young, though, and engaged in the same kind of inflammatory rhetoric they did. She became very popular on the circuit because she said pithy, pungent, unexpected things, and because she undermined the other poets in hilarious and harmless ways. Students who heard her read almost always laughed loudly and raised their fists and stomped and yelled “Right on!” This was extremely gratifying to her, because she wanted more than anything in the world a rapport with people younger than herself. This is not to suggest she used the Black revolution to bridge the generation gap, but rather that she found it the ideal vehicle from which to vindicate herself from former ways of error.

No, she had not, as several of the other poets claimed, truly believed in nonviolence or Martin Luther King (she had found his Southern accent offensive and his Christian calling ludicrous), nor had she ever worked as a token Negro in a white-owned corporation. She had never attended an interracial affair at which she was the only black, and it went without saying that all her love affairs had been correct.

On the other hand, her marriage to a lower echelon post-office functionary, who, though black indeed, was not suited for her temperamentally, foundered for many years, and shortly after the birth of a son was completely submerged. And though she was heard from coast to coast blasting the genteel Southern college she had attended for stunting her revolutionary growth and encouraging her incipient whiteness, and striking out at black preachers, teachers and leaders for being “eunuchs,” “Oreos,” and “fruits,” it was actually the son of her unsuccessful marriage that lent fire to her poetic deliveries. He was never mentioned, of course, and none of the students to whom she lectured and read her poetry knew of his existence.

He had been dead for three or four years before she even began to think of writing poetry; before that time she had been assistant librarian at the Carver branch of the Municipal Library of New York City. Her son had died at the age of fifteen under rather peculiar circumstances—after removing a large and ferocious gorilla from its cage in the Bronx Zoo. Only his mother had been able to piece together the details of his death. She did not like to talk about it, however, and spent two months in a sanitarium afterward, tying a knot over and over in one of her nylons to make a small boy’s stocking cap.

A year after she was released from the sanitarium she cut her chignoned hair, discarded her high-heel patents for sandals and boots, and bought her first pair of large hoop earrings for a dollar and fifty cents. A short time later she bought a dozen yards of African print material and made herself several bright nunnish dresses. And, in a bout of agony one day she drew small, elaborate sacrification marks down her cheeks. She also tried going without a bra, but since she was well built with good-sized breasts, going braless caused backache, and she had to give it up. She did, however, throw away her girdle for good.

She might have been a spectacularly striking figure, with her cropped fluffy hair and her tall, statuesque body—her skin was good and surprisingly the sacrification marks played up the noble severity of her cheekbones—but her eyes were too small and tended to glint, giving her a suspicious, beady-eyed look, the look of pouncing, of grabbing hold.

The students who applauded so actively during her readings almost never stopped afterward to talk with her, and even after standing ovations she left the lecture halls unescorted, for even the department heads who invited her found a reason, usually, to slip out and away minutes before she brought her delivery to a close. She received all payments for her readings in the mail.

And sometimes, after she’d watched the students turn and go outside, laughing and joking among themselves, puffing out their chests in the new proud blackness and identification with their beauty her poetry had given them, she leaned against the lectern and put her hands up to her eyes, feeling a weakness in her legs and an ache in her throat. And at these times she almost always saw her son sitting in one of the back rows in front of her, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes bright with enthusiasm for her teachings, his thin young back straight.