The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read online

  Who would have thought? That very morning my daddy had reminded me that white men are lower than snakes. But he wasn’t too high off the ground his own self. And the black men who fathered my children didn’t exactly fly among the clouds. Still, it was with a black man, the father of one of my children, that I spent the last night of my life as a pure black woman. He was out on bail, or maybe he’d run away from the jail, black men often did; and he’d come to see me and the children and one thing led to another. He was the one my mama always liked; you know how mothers sometimes be. And she came by, just as nice, and took all the children over to her house. And Daniel and me just fell in the bed together and hugged each other a long time and just started crying. And he asked me if it was true that I was going out with a white man, and I said yes. And he asked me if I thought he and I could ever get together again, even though he was set to go to prison for twenty-something years, and I said I didn’t think so. And then he asked me if he could spend the night. And I said no. But then we cried so much we tired ourselves out and went to sleep. And then around midnight we woke up, and just started to make love. And we made love over and over for the next six or seven hours, until the children came back and he had to leave.

  The next night I moved in with you. And I wouldn’t make love with you because I could still smell Daniel in my body. And the next night I said I had my period. And when we finally did make love, I felt like I had just given up.

  Every time you got mad with me about something, you always yelled that I didn’t really love you. I think it upset you that all my children were so dark. But you felt like this because until you were twenty-seven years old the thought of a black person’s life never entered your head. It was news to you that us poor black folks down in Mississippi had even survived. You thought we were just like the Indians you said no longer existed in Idaho. Sometimes, even when you were looking me straight in my face, I could see you were still surprised. I used to think I should gain a lot of weight and put on a head rag to make you feel more at home.

  I knew you were jealous of black men. And envious at the same time. You’d heard things about black men, growing up. Sexual things, that made you feel inferior. And after you saw a picture of Daniel in the newspaper, after he’d escaped from prison and was thought to be hiding out in New York City, you were evil for weeks. I was happy he’d got away. Every day of my life it hurt me to think of him in a cage. But you never understood about prison in the South. That prisons were just the modern version of the plantation. That if someone like Daniel stole something because he was hungry, he shouldn’t be forced to work cotton for the rest of his life.

  I feel somehow embarrassed, reading Dianne’s diary. I protested when Ernesto and Rosa (after Ernesto Che Guevara and Rosa Parks, of course) sent it to me. At first, I wouldn’t even open it; I was almost afraid. Afraid of what? Of seeing the writing self, my own, that might not have become. After all, there we all were, in Mississippi, at the same time, encountering the same violence, racism, sweltering heat. Only you supported me in the work I chose to do in the world. Harold did not support Dianne; though he was, apparently, a good father to her children. Whenever I think of Ernesto I actually see Harold; the way he used to stand, legs spread, his arms folded across his chest, his glasses pushed up on his head, glinting in the sun atop his turbulent blond hair.

  No, no, she wanted you to read what she was writing, even while she was writing it and you lived a few miles away! She was desperate for someone to share her writing with. This is what the children tell me. Rosa is herself thinking of writing a novel, just because Dianne never could. Ernesto thinks perhaps he will be a journalist for television.

  I sat in bed with the diary after it arrived. It is not like my journals, which are sequential, systematic, by years. It is not even finished, and is haphazard. Dianne’s thoughts are jotted down raw, just as they came to her; with no attempt to mold them into anything other than what she actually felt at the time. A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one’s experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it. For living with a white man, and having him be, somehow, in brutal Mississippi, an exemplary father to her black children, must have seemed to Dianne stranger than any childhood fantasy she might have had.

  I used to feel that way, myself. Though what I’ve come to realize about myself is that I honestly like living on the edge, wherever it is; that is where I feel most alive and most free. And so I cherished the strangeness of us; and sometimes as we sat down to eat breakfast together, I looked at you across the table and thought you might as well have been a leopard lying waiting for prey on the limb of a tree. Strange, maybe dangerous, but so exciting and beautiful!

  But back to “the ruin.”

  Your mother did not understand the concept of “brownstoning.” Buying a dilapidated row house in the wilds of Brooklyn and transforming it into a comfortable and spacious home. Why we thought she’d get it, and give us a favorable report on the house we’d chosen by photograph sent to us by a Brooklyn realtor, I know not. The exquisitely remodeled, light-filled triplex, three doors from Prospect Park, in the very best part of Park Slope, she told us was in a slum. What did we know? Essentially, what did I know? Sleepwalking through the heat of our last Jackson, Mississippi, summer, subsisting on bicycle rides and Valium, I knew only what I read in the few books on brownstoning I’d managed to buy on trips to New York. Your mother was born and raised in Brooklyn, as you were. I thought her opinion held water, until, months later, I saw with my own eyes the house she’d encouraged us not to buy. The most perfect house in Brooklyn.

  Instead, with time running out for us in Mississippi, and New York once again calling, we found ourselves with one week in which to house-shop. And chose a beautiful but literal ruin, on a calm, out of the way street in Brooklyn, that it would take a year to get completely clean, and nearly three to renovate.

  Our blood went into that house. And the last shred of the love that had so characterized our life. The plumbing alone cost every cent you received from the sale of your share of your law firm. Every word I wrote was transformed into lighting fixtures, doorknobs and paint. We were not wise enough to know not to try to live in this foolishness. We did not know we should have done something else. At times like this, I felt our isolation most keenly. That we lacked parents or friends who would say: Look how tired you both are. It’s obvious. Sell the law firm, yes, but take the money and go to Negril for six months. Write from a resort in the Rocky Mountains, if write you must, and save the money to live on the Upper West Side in New York, in a part of town already renovated. Enough, already! You don’t have to keep challenging and “improving” the world by avoiding yourselves! For we did learn to avoid ourselves, avoid each other. Our pitiful attempt to avoid our failure, avoid our pain.

  The night before we decided to buy the ruin we’d stayed at your mother’s house. She had magnanimously given us her bed. But as I sat on the edge of the bed, after putting Our Child to sleep next door, in your old room, she came in, and warned me not to put anything on her dresser because whatever I put there—hairbrush or whatever—might scratch the finish. And I knew I could not sleep in her bed. And so I went, lucky for us we’d been given the keys until we made up our minds, straight to “the ruin.” And slept alone on the floor, during what turned out to be my first night in the new house.

  We were so far apart by then I would not have wanted you to come with me. Still, I missed your nearness, in the strange, gloomy house, in which only a few lights on the first floor, and a couple on the fourth floor, worked. It was a house with eight fireplaces! Were we hoping for warmth and coziness, or what?

  But it was not to be. Not for the two of us, who, in the enormous house, passed each other like ships in the night. You went each day to a law office in midtown Manhattan, far away from the clients in Mis
sissippi whose slow, drawling comments and stories you loved, and who sometimes paid you with fried chicken and watermelons. I could see your deep unhappiness to be back in the city you’d so eagerly left. Seeking to ignore my own disorientation, I learned everything there was to know about fireplace tile and floor varnish and grout. Twice a week I went into the city to work for a women’s magazine. I had anxiety attacks of such severity I thought I would, one day, simply fail to arrive at my destination. For several years, I often felt as though I were floating through the streets of Brooklyn and New York. And that you were somewhere out there, too, but I felt little connection to you.

  But Our Child seemed happy. She had friends her own age up and down our street. She loved her school and her teachers. She had a baby-sitter across from us who was from the Islands and taught her to make wonderful simple food, like arroz con pollo, her favorite dish. This I say now, to her, in her therapist’s office, as she sits, pensively, all five feet six of her, leaning slightly forward, and, I am sad to note, silently weeping. How odd it feels to realize she could not have known, although perhaps she did, being so sensitive, the pain and sorrow that was so heavy in our hearts. That perhaps we were not dragging around the house in her child’s mind, as we were dragging around it in our own.

  And now, beloved, it seems to me that our major fault, all these years, is that we never took the time before, any of us, to properly grieve what we lost. What we, as a perky little human family in a frighteningly unloving culture and country, lost, when our small dream of an indomitable love ended. And this is in addition to the fact that we also failed to properly mourn the deaths by assassination and terrorism of so many people in public life whom we admired and loved, because to do so would have simply overwhelmed us. We would have given up and died. Maybe the beginning of our end as a couple was the day when we learned Martin had been killed and I promptly miscarried. How will anyone ever understand how much we loved him?

  Even today I can barely bring myself to listen to his voice. At times I force myself to do so. And sure enough, after thinking that my heart will break one more unendurable time, he resolutely pulls me through the pain. He left us on such a high note of fearlessness and hope. Maybe he lied to us, though. Maybe there is no “promised land” for us. Just look at this poor country, like the orphan of the Universe. But even this fails to frighten me anymore. I believe only the moment we are in is promised, and that it, whatever it is, should always be “the future” we want.

  And that is why I am thinking of you, and reminding you of a moment in which we, unlikely us, shared a vision and a reality of love, that need not be completely lost. If North America survives, it will not look like or be like it is today. One day there will be, created out of all of us lovers, an American race—remember how Jean Toomer, whom we sometimes read to each other, in Mississippi, was already talking about this American race, even in the Thirties? We will simply not let the writers of history claim we did not exist. Why should the killers of the world be “the future” and not us?

  * Not his real name.

  * Not her real name.

  Kindred Spirits

  Rosa could not tell her sister how scared she was or how glad she was that she had consented to come with her. Instead they made small talk on the plane, and Rosa looked out of the window at the clouds.

  It was a kind of sentimental journey for Rosa, months too late, going to visit the aunt in whose house their grandfather had died. She did not even know why she must do it: She had spent the earlier part of the summer in such far-flung places as Cyprus and Greece. Jamaica. She was at a place in her life where she seemed to have no place. She’d left the brownstone in Park Slope, given up the car and cat. Her child was at camp. She was in pain. That, at least, she knew. She hardly slept. If she did sleep, her dreams were cold, desolate, and full of static. She ate spaghetti, mostly, with shrimp, from a recipe cut out from the Times. She listened to the jazz radio station all the time, her heart in her mouth.

  “So how is Ivan?” her sister, Barbara, said.

  Barbara was still fond of her brother-in-law, and hurt that after his divorce from Rosa he’d sunk back into the white world so completely that even a Christmas card was too much trouble to send people who had come to love him.

  “Oh, fine,” Rosa said. “Living with a nice Jewish girl, at last.” Which might have explained the absence of a Christmas card, Rosa thought, but she knew it really didn’t.

  “Really? What’s she like?”

  “Warm. Attractive. Loves him.”

  This was mostly guesswork on Rosa’s part; she’d met her only once. She hoped she had these attributes, for his sake. A week after she’d moved out of the brownstone Sheila had moved in, and all her in-laws, especially Ivan’s mother, seemed very happy. Once she’d “borrowed” the car (her own, which she’d left with him) and when she returned it mother and girlfriend met her at her own front gate, barring her way into her own house, their faces flushed with the victory of finally seeing her outside where she belonged. Music and the laughter of many guests came from inside.

  But did she care? No. She was free. She took to the sidewalk, the heels of her burgundy suede boots clicking, free. Her heart making itself still by force. Ah, but then at night when she slept, it awoke, and the clicking of her heels was nothing to the rattling and crackling of her heart.

  “Mama misses him,” said Barbara.

  Rosa knew she did. How could she even begin to understand that this son-in-law she doted on was incapable, after divorcing her daughter, of even calling on the phone to ask how she felt, as she suffered stroke after frightening and debilitating stroke? It must have seemed totally unnatural to her, a woman who had rushed to comfort the “sick and shut-in” all her life, as it did, actually, to Rosa, who about most other things was able to take a somewhat more modern view.

  At last they were in sight of the Miami airport. Before they could be prevented by the stewardess Barbara and Rosa managed to exchange seats. Barbara sat by the window because she flew very rarely and it was a treat for her to “see herself” landing. Rosa no longer cared to look down. She had traveled so much that summer. The trip to Cyprus in particular had been so long it had made her want to scream. And then, in Nicosia, the weather was abominable. 120 degrees. It hurt to breathe. And there had been days of visiting Greeks in refugee camps and listening to Socialists and visiting the home of a family in which an only son—standing next to a Socialist leader at a rally—was assassinated by mistake. Though it had happened over a year earlier his father still wept as he told of it, and looked with regret at his surviving daughter and her small daughter. “A man must have many sons,” he said over and over, never seeming to realize that under conditions of war even a dozen sons could be killed. And not under war alone.

  And then Rosa had flown to Greece, and Athens had been like New York City in late July and the Parthenon tiny.…

  When they arrived in the Miami airport they looked about with the slightly anxious interest of travelers who still remembered segregated travel facilities. If a white person had materialized beside them and pointed out a colored section they would have attacked him or her on principle, but been only mildly surprised. Their formative years had been lived under racist restrictions so pervasive that wherever they traveled in the world they expected, on some level in themselves and in whatever physical circumstances they found themselves, to encounter some, if only symbolic, racial barrier.

  And there it was now: On a poster across from them a blond white woman and her dark-haired male partner danced under the stars while a black band played and a black waiter waited and a black chef beamed from the kitchen.

  A striking woman in a blue pastel cotton dress, tall, straight of bearing, black as midnight with a firm bun of silver white hair, bore down upon them.

  “It’s me,” thought Rosa, “my old self.”

  “Aunt Lily!” said Barbara, smiling, and throwing her arms around her.

  When it was her turn to be hugged
, Rosa gave herself up to it, enjoying the smells of baby shampoo, Jergens lotion and Evening in Paris remembered from childhood embraces, and which, on second sniff, she decided was all Charlie. That was this aunt, full of change and contradictions, as she had known her.

  Not that she ever had, really. Aunt Lily had come to visit summers, when she was a child. She had been straight and black and as vibrant as fire. She was always with her husband, whose tan face seemed weak next to hers. He drove the car, but she steered it; the same seemed true of their lives.

  They had moved to Florida years ago, looking for a better life “somewhere else in the South that wasn’t so full of Southerners.” Finding “good white people” to work for had seemed Aunt Lily’s talent. Though looking at her now, Rosa thought her aunt, by her imperial bearing, directness of speech and great height, had probably made them so. She could not imagine anyone having the nerve to condescend to Aunt Lily, or, worse, attempt to cheat her. And so, once again she was amazed at the white man’s arrogance and racist laws. Ten years earlier this sweet-smelling, squeaky-clean aunt of hers would not have been permitted to try on a dress in local department stores. She could not have drunk at certain fountains. The main restaurants of the city would have been closed to her. The public library. The vast majority of the city’s toilets.

  Aunt Lily had an enormous brown station wagon into which Rosa and Barbara flung their light travel bags. Barbara, older than Rosa and closer to Aunt Lily, sat beside her on the front seat. Rosa sat behind them, looking out the window at the passing scenery, admiring the numerous canals—she was passionately fond of water—and yet wondering about the city’s sewerage problems, of which she had heard.

  How like them, really, she thought, to build around their pretty segregated houses canals that are so polluted that to fall into one was to risk disease.