"And she believes your parents are dead, Coleman. That's what you told her."
"That's right."
"You have no brother, you have no sister. There is no Ernestine.
There is no Walt."
He nodded.
"And? What else did you tell her?"
"What else do you think I told her?"
"Whatever it suited you to tell her." That was as harsh as she got all afternoon. Her capacity for anger never had been and never would be able to extend to him. The mere sight of him, from the moment of his birth, stimulated feelings against which she had no defenses and that had nothing to do with what he was worthy of.
"I'm never going to know my grandchildren," she said.
He had prepared himself. The important thing was to forget about Iris's hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.
"You're never going to let them see me," she said. "You're never going to let them know who I am. 'Mom,' you'll tell me, 'Ma, you come to the railroad station in New York, and you sit on the bench in the waiting room, and at eleven twenty-five A.M., I'll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best.' That'll be my birthday present five years from now. 'Sit there, Mom, say nothing, and I'll just walk them slowly by.' And you know very well that I will be there. The railroad station. The zoo. Central Park. Wherever you say, of course I'll do it. You tell me the only way I can ever touch my grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to baby-sit and put them to bed, I'll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown to clean your house, I'll do that. Sure I'll do what you tell me. I have no choice."
"Don't you?"
"A choice? Yes? What is my choice, Coleman?"
"To disown me."
Almost mockingly, she pretended to give that idea some thought.
"I suppose I could be that ruthless with you. Yes, that's possible, I suppose. But where do you think I'm going to find the strength to be that ruthless with myself?"
It was not a moment for him to be recalling his childhood. It was not a moment for him to be admiring her lucidity or her sarcasm or her courage. It was not a moment to allow himself to be subjugated by the all-but-pathological phenomenon of mother love. It was not a moment for him to be hearing all the words that she was not saying but that were sounded more tellingly even than what she did say. It was not a moment to think thoughts other than the thoughts he'd come armed with. It was certainly not a moment to resort to explanations, to start brilliantly toting up the advantages and the disadvantages and pretend that this was no more than a logical decision. There was no explanation that could begin to address the outrage of what he was doing to her. It was a moment to deepen his focus on what he was there to achieve. If disowning him was a choice foreclosed to her, then taking the blow was all she could do. Speak quietly, say little, forget Iris's hair, and, for however long is required, let her continue to employ her words to absorb into her being the brutality of the most brutal thing he had ever done.
He was murdering her. You don't have to murder your father.
The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out to get your father. The world will take care of him, as it had indeed taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that's what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who'd been loved as he'd been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth, free to struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be free.
To get that from life, the alternate destiny, on one's own terms, he must do what must be done. Don't most people want to walk out of the fucking lives they've been handed? But they don't, and that's what makes them them, and this was what was making him him.
Throw the punch, do the damage, and forever lock the door. You can't do this to a wonderful mother who loves you unconditionally and has made you happy, you can't inflict this pain and then think you can go back on it. It's so awful that all you can do is live with it.
Once you've done a thing like this, you have done so much violence it can never be undone—which is what Coleman wants. It's like that moment at West Point when the guy was going down. Only the referee could save him from what Coleman had it in him to do. Then as now, he was experiencing the power of it as a fighter. Because that is the test too, to give the brutality of the repudiation its real, unpardonable human meaning, to confront with all the realism and clarity possible the moment when your fate intersects with something enormous. This is his. This man and his mother. This woman and her beloved son. If, in the service of honing himself, he is out to do the hardest thing imaginable, this is it, short of stabbing her. This takes him right to the heart of the matter. This is the major act of his life, and vividly, consciously, he feels its immensity.
"I don't know why I'm not better prepared for this, Coleman. I should be," she said. "You've been giving fair warning almost from the day you got here. You were seriously disinclined even to take the breast. Yes, you were. Now I see why. Even that might delay your escape.
There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color—there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave."
It was not a moment to give credence to her intelligence, to take even the most appealing turn of phrase as the embodiment of some special wisdom. It often happened that his mother could say some-thing that made it sound as though she knew more than she did.
The rational other side. That was what came of leaving the orating to his father and so seeming by comparison to say what counted.
"Now, I could tell you that there is no escape, that all your attempts to escape will only lead you back to where you began. That's what your father would tell you. And there'd be something in Julius Caesar to back him up. But for a young man like you, whom everybody falls for? A good-looking, charming, clever young fellow with your physique, your determination, your shrewdness, with all your wonderful gifts? You with your green eyes and your long dark lashes? Why, this should cause you no trouble at all. I expect coming to see me is about as hard as it's going to get, and look how calmly you're sitting here. And that is because you know what you're doing makes great sense, I know it makes sense, because you would not pursue a goal that didn't. Of course you will have disappointments.
Of course little is going to turn out as you imagine it, sitting so calmly across from me. Your special destiny will be special all right—but how? Twenty-six years old—you can't begin to know.
But wouldn't the same be true if you did nothing? I suppose any profound change in life involves saying 'I don't know you' to someone."
She went on for nearly two hours, a long speech about his autonomy dating back to infancy, expertly taking in the pain by delineating all she was up against and couldn't hope to oppose and would have to endure, during which Coleman did all he could not to notice—in the simplest things, like the thinning of her hair (his mother's hair, not Iris's hair) and the jutting of her head, the swelling of her ankles, the bloating of her belly, the exaggerated splay of her large teeth—how much further along toward her death she'd been drawn since the Sunday three years back when she'd done everything gracious she could to put Steena at her ease. At some point midway through the afternoon, she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being. The longer she talked, the more he believed he was seeing this happen. He tried not to think about the disease that would kill her, about the funeral they would give her, about the tributes that would be read and the prayers offered up at the side of her grave. But then he tried not to think about her going on living either, of his leaving and her being here and alive, the years passing and her thinking about him and his children and his wife, more years passing and the connection between the two of them only growing stronger for her because of its denial.
Neither his mother's longevity nor her mortality could be allowed to have any bearing on what he was doing, nor could the struggles her family had been through in Lawnside, where she'd been born in a dilapidated shack and lived with her parents and four brothers until her father died when she was seven. Her father's people had been in Lawnside, New Jersey, since 1855. They were runaway slaves, brought north on the Underground Railroad from Maryland and into southwest Jersey by the Quakers. The Negroes first called the place Free Haven. No whites lived there then, and only a handful did now, out on the fringes of a town of a couple of thousand where just about everybody was descended from runaway slaves whom the Haddonfield Quakers had protected—the mayor was descended from them, the fire chief, the police chief, the tax collector, the teachers in the grade school, the kids in the grade school. But the uniqueness of Lawnside as a Negro town had no bearing on anything either. Nor did the uniqueness of Gouldtown, farther south in Jersey, down by Cape May. That's where her mother's people were from, and that's where the family went to live after the death of her father. Another settlement of colored people, many nearly white, including her own grandmother, everyone somehow related to everyone else. "Way, way back," as she used to explain to Coleman when he was a boy—simplifying and condensing as best she could all the lore she'd ever heard—a slave was owned by a Continental Army soldier who'd been killed in the French and Indian War. The slave looked after the soldier's widow.
He did everything, from dawn to dark didn't stop doing what needed to be done. He chopped and hauled the wood, gathered the crops, excavated and built a cabbage house and stowed the cabbages there, stored the pumpkins, buried the apples, turnips, and potatoes in the ground for winter, stacked the rye and wheat in the barn, slaughtered the pig, salted the pork, slaughtered the cow and corned the beef, until one day the widow married him and they had three sons. And those sons married Gouldtown girls whose families reached back to the settlement's origins in the 1600s, families that by the Revolution were all intermarried and thickly intermingled.
One or another or all of them, she said, were descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at Indian Fields who married a Swede—locally Swedes and Finns had superseded the original Dutch settlers—and who had five children with her; one or another or all were descendants of the two mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies on a trading ship that sailed up the river from Greenwich to Bridgeton, where they were indentured to the landowners who had paid their passage and who themselves later paid the passage of two Dutch sisters to come from Holland to become their wives; one or another or all were descendants of the granddaughter of John Fenwick, an English baronet's son, a cavalry officer in Cromwell's Commonwealth army and a member of the Society of Friends who died in New Jersey not that many years after New Cesarea (the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware that was deeded by the brother of the king of England to two English proprietors) became New Jersey. Fenwick died in 1683 and was buried somewhere in the personal colony he purchased, founded, and governed, and which stretched north of Bridgeton to Salem and south and east to the Delaware.
Fenwick's nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Adams, married a colored man, Gould. "That black that hath been the ruin of her" was her grandfather's description of Gould in the will from which he excluded Elizabeth from any share of his estate until such time as "the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against Him." As the story had it, only one son of the five sons of Gould and Elizabeth survived to maturity, and he was Benjamin Gould, who married a Finn, Ann. Benjamin died in 1777, the year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence across the Delaware in Philadelphia, leaving a daughter, Sarah, and four sons, Anthony, Samuel, Abijah, and Elisha, from whom Gouldtown took its name.
Through his mother, Coleman learned the maze of family history going back to the days of aristocratic John Fenwick, who was to that southwestern region of New Jersey what William Penn was to the part of Pennsylvania that encompassed Philadelphia—and from whom it sometimes seemed all of Gouldtown had descended —and then he heard it again, though never the same in all its details, from great-aunts and great-uncles, from great-greataunts and -uncles, some of them people close to a hundred, when, as children, he, Walt, and Ernestine went with their parents down to Gouldtown for the annual reunion—almost two hundred relatives from southwest Jersey, from Philadelphia, from Atlantic City, from as far off as Boston, eating fried bluefish, stewed chicken, fried chicken, homemade ice cream, sugared peaches, pies, and cakes-eating favorite family dishes and playing baseball and singing songs and reminiscing all day long, telling stories about the women way back spinning and knitting, boiling fat pork and baking huge breads for the men to take to the fields, making the clothes, drawing the water from the well, administering medicines obtained mainly from the woods, herb infusions to treat measles, the syrups of molasses and onions to counter whooping cough. Stories about family women who kept a dairy making fine cheeses, about women who went to the city of Philadelphia to become housekeepers, dressmakers, and schoolteachers, and about women at home of remarkable hospitality. Stories about the men in the woods, trapping and shooting the winter game for meat, about the farmers plowing the fields, cutting the cordwood and the rails for fences, buying, selling, slaughtering the cattle, and the prosperous ones, the dealers, selling tons of salt hay for packing to the Trenton pottery works, hay cut from the salt marsh they owned along the bay and river shores.
Stories about the men who left the woods, the farm, the marsh, and the cedar swamp to serve—some as white soldiers, some as black-in the Civil War. Stories about men who went to sea to become blockade runners and who went to Philadelphia to become undertakers, printers, barbers, electricians, cigar makers, and ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—one who went to Cuba to ride with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and a few men who got in trouble, ran away, and never came back. Stories about family children like themselves, often dressed poorly, without shoes sometimes or coats, asleep on winter nights in the freezing rooms of simple houses, in the heat of summer pitching, loading, and hauling hay with the men, but taught manners by their parents, and catechized in the schoolhouse by the Presbyterians—where they also learned to spell and read—and always eating all they wanted, even in those days, of pork and potatoes and bread and molasses and game, and growing up strong and healthy and honest.
But one no more decides not to become a boxer because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of everything at the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy—or not to become a teacher of classics because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy—than one decides not to become anything else for such reasons. Many things vanish out of a family's life. Lawnside is one, Gouldtown another, genealogy a third, and Coleman Silk was a fourth.
Over these last fifty years or more, he was not the first child, either, who'd heard about the harvesting of the salt hay for the Trenton pottery works or eaten fried bluefish and sugared peaches at the Gouldtown reunions and grown up to vanish like this—to vanish, as they used to say in the family, "till all trace of him was lost." "Lost himself to all his people" was another way they put it.
Ancestor worship—that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing—the idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.
That night after coming back to the Village from East Orange, Coleman got a call from his brother in Asbury Park that took things further faster than he had planned. "Don't you ever come around her," Walt warned him, and his voice was resonant with something barely suppressed—all the more frightening for being suppressed-that Coleman hadn't heard since his father's time. There's another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side. The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, but now he will be over on the other side forever. Yet that, as he discovers, is exactly the point: freedom is dangerous.
Freedom is very dangerous. And nothing is on your own terms for long. "Don't you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing.
Never. Hear me?" Walt said. "Never. Don't you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!"
3 What Do You Do with the Kid Who Can't Read?
IF CLINTON had fucked her in the ass, she might have shut her mouth. Bill Clinton is not the man they say he is. Had he turned her over in the Oval Office and fucked her in the ass, none of this would have happened."
"Well, he never dominated her. He played it safe."
"You see, once he got to the White House, he didn't dominate anymore. Couldn't. He didn't dominate Willey either. That's why she got angry with him. Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him."
"Sure. Gennifer Flowers."
"What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you're still back in Arkansas, you don't fall from a very great height."
"Right. And you're expected to be an ass man. There's a tradition."