The C.L.R. James Institute: Texts: "The Haunting" by W.L. Mills (2)

The Haunting

W. L. Mills

Part Two

The Bereaved

The last time I saw Stan was during New Year's Eve; word had already reached me about his illness; in fact, I called the hospital in California just before he was leaving for Anniston, Alabama. Everyone knew that he was really coming home to die. I talked to Babette, Stan's daughter, whose hysterics were disorienting blasts of sadness and one liners that seemed to pacify each single tear and cracked octave that filled her eyes and throat. It was to this lieder that we carried on the conversation. I can't remember the particulars of the conversation; it basically boiled down to one sentence: “I feel like bootie!” she shouted, like a kid in bed with tonsillitis. When we called her father up on her three way she joked about all the hereditary diseases she was already showing signs of in her early thirties. My laughs were bellows that shook the empty office space I occupied on a New York Christmas Eve. At the end of the conversation, I dried my tears and we began the ritual of bicoastal long distance salutations. The words I said have escaped my memory. She asked me to pray for her.

Stan Jr. was playing cards with friends when I talked to him. There was something unbothered about him; his gift for hosting parties is just as prevalent in our blood-

line as the ability to pronounce long words in one breath (I didn't inherit that one); this is the same predisposition Babette exemplified when she told me the correct Latin rooted medical term for the disease that causes your molars to become detached from your gums. It is a disease she has inherited. Stan Jr. handled the situation like I would, with the weapons of detachment, denial and amorous distractions like Spades, old Chaka Khan albums and fried chicken. He said he was going to try and come to Alabama soon, I told him I would try and meet him. I said good-bye.

When I arrived in Anniston, Alabama, one day before New Year's Eve, I saw Stan sitting sideways on a couch, with his head tilted over his left shoulder and his left elbow supporting his weight. His hair was salt and pepper grey and glistened with a luster that suggested health and longevity; his body however; was emaciated. When I first saw him, a sentence of Babette's dislodged from my memory.

“How does he look?” I asked the previous Wednesday on the phone.

“Oh, I don't know,” she squirmed, “I suppose he looks like your average person who has cancer or AIDS or something.”

I could visualize her shoulder's shrugging and the sarcasm was so salty it cracked my tongue numb with silence. Babette's words seemed light and defenseless in the shadow of the heavy tone that tore through her voice. Her mind showed signs of fatigue from trying to

match language with emotions, trying to find the accurate and appropriate response.

Once I became settled, time ticked with a golden weight attached to each minute hand. The kitchen table became a place of communion. Viola was busy catering New Year's Eve parties, making what seemed like thousands of deviled eggs and assorted trays of pickled vegetables and hot peppers. Gigantic pots of eggs were boiling at all times, as she would set one of the metallic vessels on the floor between her legs, pull up her apron and carefully stack layer after layer of eggs into a solid structure that would not allow for the eggs to gyrate or bounce against one another. At other times she deep fried floured morsels of various meats.

In the mist of this party preparation my grandmother, mother, Viola and others listened to stories; and many a person entertained questions I had about our family. I heard of the old people that used to sit on the porch; and tales of the mixing of blacks and Indians in the South during the Indian raids. About a distant ancestor named Roosevelt who shot a trespassing white man dead and was told by a favorable judge to leave the county by nightfall. I heard about a great-great-aunt who contracted tuberculosis and stayed in the room that was directly behind my chair. There was a screen placed in the doorway so that children could not easily approach the woman inside. Stan talked about my grandfather and his kindness, a man I had never known and just recently found out was packing a shotgun in

the house and stood guard when Martin Luther King came to speak at a local church. I heard about our migrations in Northern Alabama and our great migrations to Chicago.

But in the end, the words and stories, and the steam produced by great vats of water and oil, boiling and popping, revealed a narrative that was skeletal with all vital information suspended in talk and hearsay. Proof had evaporated from our grasp and we were all left in a collective state of wonder, trying to decipher what the discussion meant. Our descent to our origins left us dazed, for our origins were still without date and exact place. Then, time and space melted over the table as my grandmother took her finger and started to point down hard on the tablecloth saying, “It all started right here. Me, my brother and my sister studying. Getting our lesson.” In a way the family has always accepted that as an origin, because her generation worked hard and became professionals. They became middle-class people. But I have always found that to be an unacceptable and easy way out. What about the Indian raids, the fugitives slaves, Andrew Jackson and the meetings of people — these chance and deliberate meetings, between Ibo and Yoruba and Congolese and Seminole and Irish and Creek and Cherokee — the history my education has found only parenthetical when it bothered to mention it at all. To say that our history starts at the table is to feed into our training and say that those known and unknown family members before 412 River Street

are secondary. Sadly, they are ghosts whose ability to haunt us is severely repressed by our pride in our own intellect.

On another day Stan and I sat down and had a discussion about our family history one-to-one.

“Why didn't you take note of all this information if you were alive when our elder's were around?” I asked.

Stan replied with a sigh, and leaning over towards me said “Gran' Ma Boyd regarded those days as hard times. They did not want to remember them. They did not want to repeat them.”

“Didn't they understand that they were of value?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They didn't understand it to be of any value because they could not assign any monetary value to it.”

His experience lent weight to what I could not readily say, or confront to those around me. Since they couldn't eat, rent a bed, or buy clothes with history, they thought it worthless. And though history could be treasured, memories were not monetarily redeemable nor a joyful memorial; and since we could afford to forget, the weight of time caused them to deteriorate and leave us with what were once heavy velvet tapestries, reduced to dusty, hole-ridden scripts of the past that occasionally fall from between the missing teeth of the elderly.

Later, Stan showed me a photograph of the tentacles ascending the length of his esophagus causing the raspy

noise in his throat. “The doctors don't know what is inside of me,” he said. With a heave and a cough he continued, “They have to find out what is wrong with me.” I looked at him as we sat on the couch. He explained that the “mass” was lying behind his lungs and the arms were wrapped around his heart. I held the picture in my hand and saw the string of pink flesh that was thick like a hydra's arm with two pudgy knobs at the end like the pinchers of an extraterrestrial being. It looked as if it had a life of its own and it was living in Stan's body. I handed the photo back, entertaining for a millisecond the possibility that this was some conspiracy like the Tuskegee Experiment, for this form was not cancerous, according to Stan.

When I left Stan for the last time he uttered with a paternal care and optimism “Good luck to you.” I looked back and just said, “See you when I get back.” He looked downwards, hurt, as if a little boy. He was disappointed in my in ability to take his death seriously. But my response was a last ditch effort to make the mass dissolve as if hit by a yellow ray of radiation. The smile was also to hide disappointment. I was disappointed in the life expectancy of black men. Stan was only 57 years old.

Stan Jr. promised to come to Alabama in February. I had made a promise also. Due to the new prison I had found myself in as a jobless writer in New York, I knew I couldn't keep it. But the funeral was changing all of that. We were now forced to keep our promises.

II.

I walked up to the house. My first memory of it involves the tall rose bushes that line the front of the shingle canopied porch. I am holding a piece of fruit. Maybe an apple, or an orange or maybe it is a ball that has caught my fancy. I am playing with the round object and in my nimble fingers, typical of a three year old, it falls down from the porch into the wide crevice between the flowers and the elevated brick platform. When I looked down I could smell the moist damp earth that sheltered thousands of worms, beetles and those black grasshoppers with red dots that spring to the air with a fierce kind of animation which made me run from them as if their harmless mouths would remove tiny bits of flesh from my thighs. (Recently Stan Jr. told me that when he first came to Alabama as a kid, he and Babette had never seen a black grasshopper, and that they caught one and took it on the plane back home to LA. It survived). As I raised my head from the edge of what was a severely elevated height for a three-year-old I was struck by the sun and the smell of the yellow and red roses that opened towards the sky in the middle of the afternoon. I was also very aware of the Junebugs and bumblebees whose resin-colored shells and high-speed wings left me paralyzed with fear. Though I no longer hold a phobia for bugs in general (exceptions are wasps, hornets and anything else that stings or makes honey), at three years old I had no intentions of moving anywhere toward the floral display that teemed with so

much life. I remember facing the north and my great-grandmother, better known as Ola or Grand Ma Boyd, looked at me from the east in a green wooden chair that had rockers attached to it legs. Through her glasses she looked at me sternly and pointed towards the place where the ball, orange or apple had fallen and told me to go get it, without words. I refused. I stood my ground and started to back up towards the safety of the wall behind me. Her finger was elongated and the force of this nonverbal command started to make me shutter and I slowly started to whimper. At that point I was ready to summon all of my energy to make a frantic tantrum since I didn't have the verbal know how to say: “Screw the ball.” When I was ready to hit that marker, she released the tension from behind her glasses and smiled. She looked at me as if she knew me, as if my interview or test was now complete and she had sufficiently sized me up. Funny, to this day I think that she still understood what I meant to say.

The bushes no longer exist. One of the original four pillars does not support the shingled canopy. The shrubbery in the front is no longer full in foliage and has been ravaged by unskillful hedgecutters, including my contribution of a big gap on the right side of the plant from a trimming when I was sixteen. The nights here are always restful. There is not the disorienting distraction of people congregating and continuing to migrate throughout the city at eleven o'clock on a cold winter night. The sky is always assorted hues of jet

black, navy blue and aquamarine as the sunsets and rises. There are no tall buildings masking the moon as it displays its phases in proportions that are like the slices of a silver lemon. The cooling of the air enhances smells that are covered by the humidity of the day and the silence is complete as all the beasts of the earth retire. There is no artificial light to keep you awake, few establishments are open, the day has passed and people are in perfect acceptance.

I walked in the door. I was the second to the last relative to arrive. Babette stood from a corner chair place at the edge of the large dinning room table and gave me a kiss and a hug. She said that she was just asking my mother what happened to me. I simply smiled. The leather coat she wore was pea green. Her brother described it as baby doo doo green. It was loud and summery and shiny. I told her that I was going to have to lift it. She smirked. Babette's face is refreshing. Her face is long and oval; her cheekbones high; her skin color light coffee cream warm; her eyes pull hues from the sky and seemed both brown and green, pale and heavy; her frame tall and thin with long limbs and small wrist that made everything she held seem caressed.

I was bombarded by people with firm handshakes and hearty greetings. Looking for relatives, I saw my mother sitting down showing pictures of the last family reunion to her best friend from high school, pointing to my dreadlocks from long ago. They both smiled and I just sat there with a grin; not sure how to gauge what

was to come. Viola was in a corner with tears falling down her cheek and staring at all the people in her home, who immediately made it their home. The stare was the unmistakable stare of bewilderment induced by family function. All these people came from all over the country, destined to leave when the time of their bereavement passed, only to leave her alone again, with the same problems, the same bills and the same solitary life many of us had just run away from to attend a funeral. Except her private sorrow was not caused by city life or the stress of children in college and a mortgage refinancing that was not enacted in time. Her loneliness came from her brother's death. It happened in her house, not ours. The passing of her brother made her feel intolerably alone.

Stan Jr. walked out of the room he was sleeping in and gave me a hug. He looks a lot like me, in a way. I am taller and a bit broader, but he is fit and his eyes slant, like his grandfather's, and the moles that decorate the upper crest of his checks look very attractive. His eyelashes are long like mine, but his teeth are absent of the numerous gaps that accost my upper set. His teeth are straight, even and tight. His smile always exposes them, like a well trained actor. He lives just outside of Hollywood.

I was told to eat. I declined. Then Viola ordered that I eat. And I did. I devoured fried chicken, collard greens, chow chow, cornbread and macaroni and cheese.

The meal that was laid before me was very telling.

Guests brought chicken from one of two fried chicken fast food chains. The cakes that were brought were from the deli department of a grocery store. When people did cook they came with various rolls and a couple of confections such as pound cakes, chest pie and various sweet potato dishes. As I ate, I realized that people were busier. There was not enough time for fulfillment of communal obligation by the book. The rules were different now. And, it was the exceptional dish of dirty rice, or a chocolate cake that was taken to the house next door for safe keeping. These homemade delicacies were main attractions. It was what people talked about in the midst of death, as if this feast displaced the depravation of losing a loved one. So, certain entrees and desserts were reserved for the immediate family. The general grieving population ate what was mass produced. And, as with all communal ritual, we did not covet sweeter confections nor firmer dumplings, we relinquished them to the most heavily bereaved though we were still welcome to a slice. As I sat and digested all that I had taken in, Stan Jr. looked me square in the eye and said “So, you ready to take a break from eating. I've been staring at the top of your head for a while now.”

As time passed I found myself in conversation with many people. All of my elders started with the traditional good ole boy icebreaker for those who have migrated: “Where are you now?” I responded with: “New York City.” Some jumped the gun and asked if I was still living with my “Daddy.” I said no. This caused

the air to become ionized with a nervous tension. First, I live in New York, which for many people is the pinnacle of professional achievement. The electricity was sparked and I could hear the nebula of ideas whirling in their heads: “You different.” This also meant I was older, meaning they were older. I was no longer under anyone's thumb and this placed me outside of their control. I was somewhat an equal.

The second question that fell from peoples mouths was, “What do you do?” When I said that I was an archivist, this caused some people to turn their heads. They didn't understand what that meant. That was not a career path they could recognize, nor could they measure such a profession up against the councilman, engineer, or accountant that they had become, trained their sons to become, or hoped their son might eventually become. One person simply turned his head. It was the first time I had really told a lot of them my true goals. At least the men in the family. I had now opted to compete in their company.

I continued to talk to my cousin Ronald who was an engineering professor. He said he didn't know anything about being a historian. But we went on to talk about scholarships, money, black professionals, etc. I wish I had talked to him before I took out that loan, or he was around when I was trying to make a balanced and firm decision in life. Before, I was attacked by my immediate family for wanting to become a bartender and freelance writer. Before, I went into a graduate

program without exploring what I wanted intellectually. But then again, his response might have been the same, seeing that he only knows about engineering, like my father and like Stan. So, naturally the impasse began to form. This abyss is where we decide that our worlds separate us via experience. There was his skepticism that the choice I was making was not worth anything monetarily, translating into the support of a wife and children. There was my animosity to his entire generation in the family who didn't place value on nor take the time to notice other points of view, translating into my anger about what I have always perceived as a lack of support.

I looked at Ronald across the table and thought that he was extremely proper and tight. I was wondering where and how we could get across the void that his quantum analysis and my critical narrative produced in our closed minds. Just as we paused, and let an uncomfortable silence build, Stan Jr. sat down next to us.

So, the questions came firing on him one by one. What do you do? Where do you live? Are you planning on getting married? Stan Jr.'s answer? “Well, I am a social worker in Los Angeles. I live alone and don't plan on getting married. And, I think it is like what a friend of mind said. Why should I have a kid just for him to live in my house, eat my food, wear my clothes, and then call me a motherfucker behind my back?” Ronald turned his head back to the fried pies on his plate with

raised eyebrows and a burst of stone cold blood running to his face. Ronald said very calmly that it was only a phase. And, despite the bits of words and sentences that lingered a couple of minutes longer between our three sets of lips, the conversation was over. I looked at Stan Jr. and laughed very loud. I had missed him so much.

Title & Contents

Part One
The Wounded
(page 1)

Part Three
The Saved
(page 27)

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Uploaded 4 July 2001