Eternity
for me has always possessed these immaculate bay windows that look out onto
blind alternate takes of the last time I saw my father before he entered that
great always on February, 15, 1987. He, a mahogany black man at about 6’3,’’
roused from his habitual afternoon nap for the event, was being arrested by a
couple of stout white cops at the door of our Iowa home. I had turned him in; I
had lied and said it was his brother Percy at our door, my mom’s advice, I was
five, I was high yellow and what did he do to be so black and blue. But I knew
even then how he was a true artist
and healer too: a singer, griot, town crier, such wise moans he could make us
see our bones and mend them just sitting at his home piano being honest–
Famous, fearlessness, anonymous, 52. Maybe the beatings were just him trying to
paint my white mother, his second white wife, 25, into his delta of pain and
promise, his inability to believe that her love for him was real and his need
to make sure she was irrevocably his until she would wear it like a tattoo. I
believe that to be true. My mother and I both loved him as if it was, we
trusted the double scenario of him as a symptom of this country’s chronic
post-traumatic slave syndrome, and still do. And then sometimes understanding
is fatal. That was our special danger there in that house, three half-martyrs
to the so-called race problem cheating at our family game of musical chairs and
someone had to stand for it: for the interchangeability of tenderness and
terror, exhilaration and dread, black and white into silver screen or smoke
screen. The last words I remember him saying were but if you guys leave me I’ll die. My romance, doesn’t have
to have a heart.
I
don’t think I’ve ever been numb and I certainly wasn’t numb to his plea, I was
just certain we would all go on forever being who we are, I wasn’t under the
bribery in that moment, plus I was five. It was like why it might be easier to
write a myth in a language you can only half speak, or to trust one in that
same half-grasped language. All verbs are in the present tense and the
conditional if feels absurd and almost violating: what do you mean ‘if’ --
promises were like signs of illiteracy and I knew he was too powerful for that
finite feeling he enacted then, even as I knew he meant it, he never broke his
word, his word never broke him as the internal hymns of powerful men roll off
their common speech like prophecy. And the next thing I remember we were on
these cots in battered women’s shelter, my mom and I. We had a really
benevolent social worker and a friend at the shelter with sleeping sickness who
would fall asleep standing up in the elevator all the time just when we needed
to enter the dream like a metronome for our infinite chances and wispy
inevitability. We were hiding I think, from my father’s family who lived in the
neighborhood and who we knew would be irate about my father’s young white
second wife having sold him out to the pigs. The race was on.
It
wouldn’t be long before we would fly to San Diego to be with my grandparents on
my mother’s side, who I ironically called “the white grandma and the white
grandpa” cause of their pitch white hair, not cause I understood that the race
was on. My mom was about 8 and a half months pregnant at the time. It wouldn’t
be long after that, before I would watch her slide down their hallway wall
weeping like one of those dimly lit daytime TV ads for anti-depressants at the
news of my father’s eternity and all I could say at that casually intense,
impatient age was It’ll be okay.
Stay, Valentine, stay. Three days later my sister Sara was born.
---
Let’s
try again. The last time I saw my father he was running through a field of mute
purple flowers holding on to that pale brown Stetson hat he always wore with
one hand and flipping the invisible the bird with the other. Everyone coughs up
blood in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital, it’s tradition.
Flashback to the precise moment I first waved to him from the white horse on
the carnival carousel one time, cotton candy ink coating my gloriously tiny
fingers as I turned the corner crooking my neck to watch my favorite audience,
magic. We’re moving forward toward our myth. I’ll pick the cotton candy if you
sing to me a blues about it. Dye hue number 7 blue. But don’t use that word.
Rhymes with idle. Don’t worship idols. Don’t talk about color anymore either.
Eternity for men.
--
One
more time. The last time I saw my father he was tore up on and off his lithium
like a radio signal sitting at the piano bench half asleep writing a song about
me he called Midnight Girl, this
gigantic elegy for himself that I could come to mean, transcending. Happy
elegy. Carefree elegy. The meek ain’t gonna inherit shit, ‘cause I’ll take it,
elegiac leadership. You can’t be with me,
cause you’re a midnight girl, who no one can ever own, cause you belong to the
world...
--
No,
that’s not all of it. The last time I saw my father, gun in one hand, cross in
the other, don’t panic. These are the two objects beneath all modern love
buzzing like a partially-flipped light switch, coming to terms and then leaving
terms for speechlessness or to function. They switch hands, the heart opens and
flutters and you tell your first born under a lucky sign how one thing leads to
another...
---
There’s
more. I think there’s more. The last time I saw my father he was driving me
everywhere like a purpose. He wore that same pale stetson and said you okay... it wasn’t a question. The
car disappeared and I woke up in a tree with a craving for drums, spunky
tambourines, new associations, the burning candle, to be as delicate as I am
and so tough I disperse when you try and touch me with envy and I turn into him
for then, he offers up all of his weapons, the guns, the getaway cars, and I
chose the voice again. If you conflate intelligence with repression, and reward
decorum like it’s a triumph, you’ll understand the Western view of tragedy as
the highest form of art and aspire toward it and that would be tragic. Wear the
red dress with the black spirit and the white privilege, fuck everybody who
asks you what you’re mixed with or just lovingly ask yourself, what are you
mixed with?
---
No,
I think it went more like when blame is obsolete and the breeze is so light it
aches like a cure, who do you love? What do you love about them? Forget everything else. Become that.
