Portrait of a Coastguard
“Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to
be read by a specific somebody. When you read that kind you know you are
eavesdropping. You know a real person somewhere will read the same words you are
reading and the story is that person’s business and you are ghost listening in.”
John,
First, let me begin by saying I hope these words reach you in the best of health
and spirits. Second: Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Forty years of publishing is
damn sure something to celebrate. On the other hand, there are no milestones here to
report. I’m still fretting over an unfinished novel, still teaching. Speaking of which, the
other day I was talking to one of my classes about code switching. I ended up telling
them this story about a dude I heard yapping his business on the payphone at the 125th
street subway stop.
“Yo roll that spliff up kid. What? No, I ain’t got no parole. Maxed out the whole
nickel. Just got like ten years of probation. Or eight, or some shit like that. I gotta
ask somebody. Nah kid, I ain’t fuckin with no bitches. Trying to get that money.
That legal money. Like a nine-to-five working security or some shit. Buy my right
little man’s some Timberlands or something. I owe him at least that much after
five years.”
After I recounted the conversation to my students, I asked them where—other
than the platform, the stoop, or the penitentiary—that language was acceptable? The
day it happened though, I thought about other questions: what was homeboy’s story,
what kind of pain was he in, and how would he describe that pain to someone else?
Riding home that night it struck me that my generation—he and I couldn’t have
been more than five years apart—may be the most inarticulate group that has roamed
the earth since probably the Neanderthals. It must be our destiny manifest. They call us
Generation X, Gen-X’ers, the “X” like Malcolm’s “X,” a fill in for our namelessness, our
supposed lack of an identity. But like your narrator says in “newborn thrown in trash and
Dies,” “The facts speak for themselves, but never speak for us.” Doug Copeland and
those sociologists were wrong. The facts prove we don’t deserve an “X.” We got a
phenomenon. Mr. CBS broadcasting his business over the payphone, my cohorts and I,
my compadres, or cutties as the Crips back home say, are the Crack Generation,
Generation Crack if we’re remixing. And yes sir, I know making this claim is like
preaching to a congregation of elders that have my sermon memorized. For proof I
submit exhibit A:
“…a son in prison for life, twin girls born dead, a mind-blown son who roams the
streets with everything he owns in a shopping cart, a strung out daughter with a
crack baby…nephews doping and gangbanging, nieces unwed, underage,
dropping babies as regularly as the seasons.”
When I read those lines I deemed you the truth. I suspected you knew the truth
too and that it was born of intimate dealings. There were/are two or three generations
between us and thousands of miles separating Homewood from Northeast Portland, but
those years and that distance didn’t/don’t matter. We are kindred. I knew the lives of
the family you described as well as I knew the stories of the tribe of brown faces that share
my blood. And because I recognized those stories, “Weight” affected me in a way no
fiction to that point had. It gave me hope that my experience was worthy of recording,
that I could explore the people that had populated my life without being dismissed, and
that that exploration would resonate emotionally with others. In effect you gave me
license to travel what time had already taught you was a treacherous road.
And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's
keeper?
Do you remember our first face-to-face encounter? For you it was probably
another well-paid summer workshop. Spend a week imparting your wisdom of craft to a
group of variously talented neophyte scribes, then venture off to Paris to spend the rest of
the summer canoodling (hard to imagine you canoodling) with Katherine. But
circumstances changed; there I was, the young buck, spacey with adulation, stalking an
opportunity to trade the stories that would connect us and create a common ground,
hedging that by the end of ten days I’d could corral a mentor. I mean how could you
refuse? We were kindred right? Family right? Or so I thought until our first
conversation.
“I really didn’t have the money to spend for this program,” I explained. “Only
reason I signed up is cause I thought we could establish something that extends past this
next ten days.”
Your response included talk of other students and commitments and time and
privacy and your own writing and travel and rest… Translation: not in this lifetime little
man! I went home that day deflated, angry, cursing, kicking myself for wasting borrowed
money. And I wrote Each One Teach One. Weak. Not even a story, more like a vehicle, a
banged up Pinto with bad transmission, to vent. I read it the next day at the student
reading. You introduced me and then sat in the front row—unawares you’d tiptoed into
territory of an ambush—amid a standing room only crowd that included what seemed
like the whole NYU writing community. Back then I thought reading the story was some
grave risk, but in hindsight calling it a risk insinuates, at that point, we had a relationship
for me to squander. You said nothing when I finished, not the next day or the day
after—putting in practice in real life the silences that saturate your work—but conceded
the last hour of the last day of the workshop.
“Here’s my number,” you said. “Give me a call and whatever I can do to help I
will.”
Here’s something else about that day I remember: we were on the NYU campus,
in Ireland House, looking out the window at Washington Square Park. You wore a black
t-shirt, black jeans and sneakers, a get-up that preened away twenty birthdays. In this
portrait though—furrowed brow, cheeks grooved, vein snaking from your temple,
remnants of a 60’s natural—you are the visage of wisdom and maturity. Dark sport coat,
color dress shirt, pattern tie hanging navel length, you confer status, accomplishment,
assurance. You are a man. You are the man. “Grown ass man to the second power,” I
might describe you to my boys back home.
Revisiting this photo of you now calls to mind what Roger Wilkins writes in his
essay White Out: “The greatest power turned out to be what it had always been: the power
to define reality where blacks are concerned and to manage perceptions and therefore
arrange politics and culture to reinforce those definitions.” No matter the medium, be it
with our images or our words, the goals are similar right? Show what was and what is in
order to articulate the possibilities of what could and should be. With high powered
lenses at the disposal of picture takers these days I don’t know from what distance Phyllis
Jensen snapped this shot, whether or not you glimpsed her zeroing in her focus from your
peripheral, but what I’d be willing to bet is that you, at that exact moment of image
capture, are freed from the hefty baggage of Dubois’ double consciousness. I’d double
down that that subsequent freedom imbued you with a comfort that equated control,
which is exactly what we—as black men especially, irrespective of generation—must
possess in order to combat what amounts to a cornucopia of malicious representation.
In this photo, left arm resting on the podium, right armed raised—poised perhaps
to slap down emphasis—mouth parted, your eyes fixed on something in the audience,
you could be a civil rights leader: Malcolm in the Autobahn ballroom, Martin at the
Lincoln Memorial, John at Bates College. I don’t know what your speech included that
year before the millennium dawned, but you could have very well began your address
with a quote from Baldwin: “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus
control their circumstances or in order not to be submerged by a situation that they
cannot articulate.” During the course of that speech you could have emphasized the
power of portrait, of words, of literacy, of literature, of rhetoric, remind us that our stories
are paramount not only to our prosperity but to our survival. You could have roused the
audience with a bit of relevant hyperbole: “Image is everything”; “give me a metaphor
long enough and I’ll move the earth”; “Words change the world.”
Maybe you could have laid out a more simpler directive: read! Nike says, Just Do
It. Wideman says, Just read! Again. Just read! Nothing like a little repetition to
emphasize the prescience of that advice and deliver me to the threshold of my last point.
The other day I read Sherman Alexi’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and
Me.” He writes towards the end, “I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read
with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had
only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.” So what I’m saying here is that if I am
right about my generation—the Crack Generation, Generation Crack if we’re
remixing—being the most inarticulate that has ever roamed this place we call home, and
if I am equally right that images also constitute language, and furthermore if Baldwin is
right that language keeps us from being submerged, and Alexi is right about the language
in those books having the power to save lives, then that makes your forty year (and
counting) career one unrelenting search and rescue mission. John Edgar Wideman:
Rhodes Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, Pen Faulkner winner (to the second power)—Coast
Guard.
Thanks for the lifejacket,
Mitch