The C.L.R. James Institute: Texts: "The Haunting" by W.L. Mills (1)

The Haunting

W. L. Mills

Part One

The Wounded

On a muggy Monday morning, I picked up the phone at my ambiguously defined publishing job (that involves more trafficking and advertising than the prescribed label of “publicity assistant”) and heard an aspirated and depressed woman on my voice mail. Her SOS was snuggled firmly between the ad agency's message about my 5:00 deadline and a generous thank you from a good friend for attending a lecture held by two Cuban writers I'd never read. The young woman, in a desperate whisper, stated her telephone number as if she was broadcasting on a broken radio transmitter and Orka was circling her tiny little crab boat. I didn't know who it was. I allowed the tell-tale area code to slide pass my eardrum without a thought. I didn't pick up my pen because I'd just write it down later. When the woman came up for air, she said it was her - my ex-fiancee.

I tried to tell my co-workers, who are all women. But, they are all New Yorkers by birth or by transplant and not Southerners whose friends are married or raising children. Young people in New York are torn between a promising second chance at adolescence (because you spent most of your life learning antonyms to the word sycophant to get into a “good school” and

temp on Madison Avenue) and the very natural pull of marriage and children that ironically feels inorganic compared to the drive that our consumer culture demands in order to keep our 401K plans kicking. So, the value of natural life cycles such as well-paced courting and extravagant matrimonial services is reduced to introducing your significant other to your parents, moving in for a year and going to the court house. Even if you get married, as New York professionals in your twenties, chances are you will wait to have kids, leaving about a ten-year window to explore yourself as compared to my hometown classmates who are already working on their second kid and mortgage armed with a high school diploma and pick-up truck.

II.

I miss the women I grew-up with in the South. Their pageant and myth of marriage drives them through the virgin, mother and crone phases with each passing birth, divorce, abortion, boyfriend, husband's burial, rice throwing, adoption and church service. In these sanctuaries, women tread yards of blood-of-Christ red velvet carpeting to negotiate a good catch for daughters, sisters, nieces, cousins and mothers (if the need arises) with the precision and marksmanship of a CEO at the Tokyo board meeting. This viscous mix of old women, Liz Taylor perfume and big hats is missing from my life here; and even more so, the serious, smart, aggressive young daughters that lie beyond these

veiled and sometime girdled figures.

III.

This past Christmas my mother picked up my sister and me from the Atlanta airport and drove us to Anniston, Alabama, the place of her birth. It is also the place where the Freedom Riders' buses were turned over and where she had to walk through the back door to see a museum exhibit. It is the city where my larger family has resided on the same block and attended the same church for four generations. Anniston is our 0 Patria, where second, third and fourth cousins make jagged pilgrimages from Washington DC, Houston, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia and any other place where migration has transplanted branches of our tree. My cousin Viola stays in the house my great-grandmother and father built. When we began our drive into the neighborhood of South Highland, I spotted a black sports car with Pennsylvania plates.

“Moma, whos daat?” I asked as I slowly felt my New York accent disintegrate like a sour grape Now & Later.

“Oh,” my mother said in one breath. “That'sViola'sex-husbandfromPhiladelphiawhoshe hasn'tseenintwentyfiveyears. His name is William.”

I stared at the black sports car that sped up the hill and made a right on the adjacent slope that descends downward to Viola's house. Momma continued to talk, but with a little snicker that conjured the image of William stepping out of the car and Viola standing on

the porch releasing a salvo of curses and insults that pummeled his forehead and ricocheted from his teeth, killing birds in mid-air and rustling dirt up from the ground as the thirty-pound-heavier ex-husband walked with arms out spread like a Temptations balladeer trying to ward off the siren's evil eye and the battalion of unholy trills engulfing his body in blue colored flames.

Dear Dear (my grandmother) gave the sordid details through the eye glances and “ugh hum’s” that accented her speech. Then there was my younger sister, the silent medium, who says very little. She soaked up the vibrations of the sun, the 38 channel basic cable programming, and the psychic conversation between my mother and grandmother with a leisurely slouch in an orange leather chair. My mother filled in the gaps for me, careful not to tell why twenty-five years ago Viola simply called her brother and left William within the first year of their marriage. But, you see, that was not the point of this gossip session. The point was William came to Christmas dinner uninvited.

It has always been this way since my parents divorced when I was eleven. To some extent, it was like that before my mother made the decision to move out. I have always had this back seat view of the spectacle of female bonding and the passing of information through non-verbal language in rapid firing actions. I

have always felt comfortable with the “grown folk.”

Today, the energy of these women is becoming extinct. They are the last living vessels of pill box hats and white gloves; of coal black Akan-looking people with model T's; of a classless society where black graduates who recited Chaucer in Old English ate together with blacksmiths; of a classist society filled with bridge clubs and juke joints. They are from a world where the things they obtained in spite of society were an accent to their character and not solely materialistic nomenclatures. These are the beautiful black women who witness, but never allowed themselves to suffer unmentionable humiliations at the hands of Jim Crow. These tall beautiful women managed to be warrior queens; proving that to be a true diva you have to spend as much time on your interiors as well as your exteriors. I can't find any women like that in New York and the young sapphires of today’s South hold these traits, but they are housed in the upscale motivations of “healthy competition.” But, women working is no great surprise. My greatgrandmother, grandmother and mother all worked before economics and various ideologies made it common for women to work with the added twist of making strides in the white man's world. They had their own communities and their own jobs whether as a seamstress, a teacher, or a housemaid. They contributed to household. The revolution was functional when based out of their homes and churches; but Wall Street, The White House and Hollywood, for some, was never

contemplated not because of hopelessness, but because they were not desired. So, as time has gone on each generation passed has lost something in assimilation that has made the drama of life less seasoned to taste and more a question of looking like Ozzie and Harriet. Life is gilded in material things, while the interiors of our relationships are in decay.

Christmas dinner later that afternoon proved to be interesting. When I walked into Viola's house William was sitting down with a drink and watching television. Viola was sitting at the head of the dinner table smoking a cigarette in a house coat with her salt and pepper hair in Shirley Temple curls....

Before I go on, I should let you know that this was a dinner with “the people.” Meaning, that you brought a dish or cooked one when you got there. And since prayers and four letter words are spread evenly throughout conversation, blessing your food is your own business.

Viola was casual and cordial to everyone and remained quiet the entire time William was in the house. She didn't say a word to William as everyone else fed the elephant in the living room with much caution as to not trigger another round of artillery fire from our most gracious host.

William's hairline had receded evenly across his forehead. The gold tooth, heavy cologne and long manicured nails brought images of the fathers and husbands

I'd seen enter and leave these houses. Not the men who moved away for a better career, but those down-to-earth brothers around my father's age who changed from thin bird-chested men into Kwame Nkrumah-like dignitaries of a Motown youth eaten up by careers in the army, post office and civil services. The longer I sat down, the more I realized that I was not embarking on the same journey. My friends who stayed in Alabama or lived in Nashville, Tennessee where I grew up were noticeably heavier and moved from here to there with wives and/or children, passing high fives and raspy guttural laughs in between gulps of beer, just as we witnessed on those hot summer days while our parents spun Aretha Franklin albums till we knew all the lyrics by heart. I glanced at the picture on the mantel and saw my cousin Wendel with his wife and baby. I kept hearing stories about my cousin Ronald's wedding in Houston that I missed. He is only one month and two days younger than me, yet stories from the big event dated him in the league of all the guys sitting around me drinking beer and watching the basketball game. This is when living in New York seems to freeze my life in place. Trying to bebop around the art scene, the music industry, and publishing affords me leisure time to think and explore, but when I try to maneuver through the streets and stores that I call home, I feel like a bloated walrus weighed down by a lack of responsibility. My freedom seemed of minimal value compared to William and my cousin Gat (everyone calls him Daddy) who I

ended up sitting next to in front of the television.

Meanwhile, the women gathered around Viola like high rollers packing enough sarcasm to defuse the middle-aged flatter resting on the sofa. Viola sat at the head of the table surrounded by my mother, grandmother, sister, and cousins. Most of these women were at the wedding 25 years ago. My mother, the youngest of all the grandchildren who played in the house that was now Viola's, sat with her elbows in her lap like a 15-year-old girl. You know, the really tall one. The really shy one. The really pretty one. My grandmother was the oldest and let her head and neck extend like a chaperone from an all girl's school with her practiced gaze of boredom that doesn't affront but is designed to attract conversation. Viola's sister-in-law would glance in William's direction from the side of her glasses while eating ice box pie or sucking on a lemon, distorting her tart smacks into harsh cold cracks, that was a sign of impatience. Viola, stayed in the center flapping her house shoes off her toes and smoking her cigarettes with the curls falling from the center of her head in a glossy unkempt trail that somehow stayed clear of her profile. When William suddenly asked for a cup or the phone, Viola picked it up and handed it to him or to a young woman that was sitting down next to her without a word and a poised, well behaved face. She returned to her seat and rubbed her leg, then asked someone to make a pot of coffee. While the coffee was brewing the conversation and laughter would com-

mence again with Daddy's wife, Dot, shifting the chatter at her will, as if she was put in charge of orchestrating the wedding rehearsal that was being re-enacted on this Christmas night.

We, the fellas, sat and watched television. It was a bit more direct, and non-nuanced, as most guys are. William explained how he hated to sleep alone in his house now that his second wife had died. How his kid only wanted him for money and the mistakes he had made in judging the value of life. He was angry at the young boys in the neighborhood who were living with girls without paying rent and basically being fed and clothed by them. “Shit, I wish I knew what the hell they were doing to get that deal. Damn! I can't even imagine what kind of relationship that is?” he exclaimed slapping his knee and switching his body to the left almost like a rocking horse pushed off balance. Daddy basically said that if things on this planet kept going the way that they were going we would have twenty years tops and his advice for relationships was not to hit a woman. Daddy is dapper, salt and pepper, no wrinkles, and has the body of a thirty year old. Daddy is a great-grandfather.

VI.

Experience counted here and I had very little. I was almost married to a woman from Atlanta, who constantly held me at bay while she maneuvered around looking for her best option in the most promising and most secure biology or political science major. But her

mental and emotional bonds with me were hardly binding, we were 19, 20 and 21. But, we were 19, 20 and 21 in the South, so we were very old. I remember when she had to leave college for a year and take care of her mother. I remember when she talked about bathing her sick grandmother when she was young 14, her Nana was so light she could lift and lower her frail body into the lukewarm water by herself. I remember her conversations with her father at 13. She remembers me being the only man in the house at 11. She remembers me partying in juke joints one Christmas in the Mississippi Delta at 14. She remembers me sitting in on parent teacher conferences in high school for my younger sister, while my mother worked. She remembers what a tight serious little basket case I was when we first met. But in the mess of William's loneliness and the permanent stares of all the married couples on the mantels and the real life ones surrounding me in my little Yule Tide men's movement, she hardly felt like an ex-fiancee as much as just a girl I knew in school who I really liked but was searching for a husband and I was one of the candidates. I'd like to think that I was the one that she loved, but I don't know. What she said to me was wonderful, but how she treated me ... well I was young.

VII.

The next day William came by from the hotel where Viola vanquished him. It was basically for leftovers and a good-bye. He said good-bye to my mother who was

in her early twenties at the time of their first meeting and repeated the gesture to others, in whichever way others would allow him into their lives. I got the handshake that signaled “I don't know about you.” Being in my mid-twenties without a child or a wife made me still a neophyte in a coed organization of battered men and women. Some of the younger ladies were amazed at William's charming demeanor and his handsome middle aged mystique, accented by a cologne that I still can't place. During the grasping of sweaty palms and sarcastic comments Viola stopped smoking, placed the cigarette in the ashtray, stopped dangling her left leg from over the right knee, and smiled: “OK then, I guess I will see you out.” Her smirk was like my mother's in the way their eyes sparkled. The sashay of her arms and hips was as if she was chasing a postman exiting her front gates; it was young, flirtations and mocking, as if her hours of silence allotted her an escape from an ill fated suitor.

I don't know what was said on the porch. It was not a terribly long time, but it did seem quite sad, since I know what Viola faces and I have heard the confusion and sadness in William's voice. But, I grew up looking at their wedding picture on the mantel in my greatgrandmother's house. Viola was in a large Afro and cream colored knitted dress, William in a soldier's uniform looking groovy, as if they could carry the world between their arms. They seemed to love each other on the porch for five minutes the way they did years ago.

But one thing about being a diva, you have to accept where you are “today,” as my mother and grandmother constantly repeated. And on that day, William drove back to Philly.

VIII.

At work, I picked up the phone and left my home number on my ex-girlfriend's answering machine. The following morning I called before work. She asked how I was doing. She asked how was my health. I told her I was fine, but my mother had surgery in April and my grandmother had developed Alzheimer's. She said that she understood and suggested that when my grandmother starts to act “funny,” take her in the car and drive around and talk. “In about half an hour she will forget what upset her,” she said in a soft whisper. She asked why I hadn't called her earlier. I told her I was fine. And as she ran around the house with her cordless trying to get to work by nine, I sat upright on the floor in my little apartment tying my shoes. Then I heard in her soft voice “Call me if you need anything.” I said OK and we hung up. I won't call her. I don't need anything. She lives in Atlanta. I live in New York.

Title & Contents

Part Two
The Bereaved
(page 13)

Part Three
The Saved
(page 27)

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Uploaded 4 July 2001