Writing to Save a Life. John Edgar Wideman

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СКАЧАТЬ Till told an interviewer Emmett almost missed his train to Mississippi. She said they had to hurry to get to the Twelfth Street Station on time. I believe I’ve seen that station, that it’s in the documentary I watched, Say Amen, Somebody, about the origins of gospel music, featuring Willie Mae Ford, legendary Chicago singer. I replay a scene in which the middle-aged daughter and son of Willie Mae Ford drive down a ramp into a train station’s underground parking lot. Stroll with them up to street level. Peer with them into a window near an unused entrance to the station. Our faces press close to the glass. With tissues from her purse, the daughter scrubs at a thick coat of grime. Boy, oh boy. Look at that. The camera meanwhile previews the station’s dark interior—an old-fashioned passenger coach abandoned on the tracks where it was uncoupled last, giant cylindrical metal containers stacked against a wall, unrecognizable debris scattered everywhere, gathering dust and rust in the gloom. Coming down here and seeing this decay, based on what it used to be, my, my, puts it all in one package, the man says to his sister, both of them standing inside the station now, eyes panning like the camera. My, my, the man sighs, close to tears. He recalls for his sister the station’s better days, a busy hub of activity when their mother was a star on the gospel music circuit, funny how every time those redcaps be knocking each other out the way to pick up Mama’s luggage. Not about tips. No, no. You know Daddy. Daddy didn’t believe in tips. Huh-uh. A dime sometimes maybe, most they gon get, if they got that.

      Grainy clips earlier in the documentary had shown Willie Mae Ford, gospel queen in furs and feathered hats, departing or returning home to Chicago. Freedom trains full of colored emigrants from the south used to land many times a day in Chicago, trains whose sounds are embodied in the old, new music Willie Mae Ford sings, music baptized “gospel” by Reverend Thomas Dorsey, a.k.a. Georgia Tom, a blues troubadour in his younger days. Dorsey’s gospel music too bluesy for some folks. Too much Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Ida Smith hip-shaking, home-breaking in it, explains Say Amen, Somebody, and not everybody ready to hear it inside their churches. I remember when lots of them wouldn’t have Mama to sing let alone preach, the sister says to her brother.

      The train station in the video could be the same one where September 2, 1955, Mamie Till, dead Louis Till’s wife, dead Emmett Louis Till’s mother, accompanied by her father, an uncle, cousins, an undertaker, two preachers, one named Louis Henry Ford (the father of Willie Mae Ford?) wait for the train from Mississippi bringing her murdered son back home to Chicago. Same train, the City of New Orleans, Emmett had boarded alive to leave Chicago less than two weeks before. A large crowd congregated at the station on September 2 to support Mrs. Till and witness the terrible truth of a story read in the papers, passed by word of mouth, concerning one of theirs, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy on a summer visit to relatives in Money, Mississippi, a boy beaten, shot, his mutilated body wired by the neck to a seventy-pound cotton gin fan and tossed into the Tallahatchie River to punish him, his cousin’s story claims, for wolf-whistling a white woman.

      The tape plays on and I listen for the Till train’s entry into the station. Listening as I still listen some Sunday mornings for the scratchy music from my mother’s cracked black plastic radio tuned to WAMO at the end of the dial. My fair-skinned mother humming along as she spray-starches and irons one of my brown-skinned father’s white shirts for church. White shirts with collars and breasts ironed stiff, my father wears under his waiter’s jacket six days a week downtown in a dining room in Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, a restaurant that used to be barred by a gold rope across the entrance, by a hostess notoriously uncordial towards colored folk who dared to eat there. Louis Till must have owned a white shirt. My father’s white shirt for church Sunday morning was more perfectly white and gleaming than the perfect ones worn to work every weekday and Saturday. My father’s hardness and absence crackled in those white shirts he demanded be kept spotless, wrinkle-free. In a room rented after he left us for good, gospel plays on a radio while he removes a laundered white shirt from its cellophane wrapper. He turns his back to me to put it on. When he’s facing me again, I watch his thick, dark fingers button the shirt, tremble to work gold-rimmed cuff links into tiny holes.

      Even as a boy fourteen years old, Emmett Till’s age when Emmett Till was murdered, I understood my father hated those white shirts. Hated them and loved them, too. I also understood, boy or not, I was a large enough boy to get my ass out of bed and help my mother the night I heard a terrible crash in our living room. I knew my parents were fighting, but instead of rushing to save my mother, I lay petrified, pretending to sleep, afraid of a white shirt glowing in the darkness of the adjoining room. I held my breath, waited for my mother’s footsteps to prove she was alive and had managed to pick herself up from the floor.

      My father had been waiting for my mother. I knew this without spying on him. How could I sleep while my father sits out there waiting for my mother, waiting with the lights off in the other room, not a sound for hour after hour except music playing in my head and the snoring of my siblings. Rakhim in bed beside me was the worst. On good nights the other kids’ restlessness and nasty noises were quieted by sounds of my mother busy in the kitchen, scrubbing dirty pots, rinsing, drying, stacking dishes. The rasp of a crooked cupboard door that never shuts first try. The last thing every evening she runs water for a cool drink then washes her cup and puts it away for coffee next morning. Same cup she uses all day so she doesn’t make extra work. Plate, knife, fork and spoon set out for my father each night he’s not home for dinner so he knows there’s food in the fridge to warm up if he hasn’t eaten on the job or smuggled home fancy leftovers from late night private parties he works. Last final thing, she switches off the kitchen light, and the yellow bar under our bedroom door dims.

      Some nights I keep listening after my mother leaves the kitchen, crosses the living room, into the hall. Listen past the point she’s probably asleep in the tiny room squeezed into a corner of a landing at the top of stairs that go down to the Lemingtons’ apartment. My parents’ room is a room far enough away to muffle their whispers, their preparations for sleep on those rare nights they go to bed together. Though certain nights, I think I hear the blue crackle of a white shirt as my father pulls it off, or hear my mother alone in their bedroom humming gospel like she hums when she’s up very late waiting for my father to come home and he doesn’t, and she hums herself to sleep curled on the couch. Always gone when I jump up first thing next morning to check.

      No matter how long I listen, sooner or later my vigil fails. I drop off and lose her. Worst nights, lying awake beside my youngest brother Rakhim, I worry and worry that everything I love and hate will be gone in the morning and never return. I listen long after my mother finishes her last little things, turns off the kitchen light and the bright inch under the door is replaced by faint illumination leaking in from a lamp by the front door she always leaves on for my father. I wonder if my mother’s sleeping or not in the bedroom, more closet than room, where she’s supposed to be. Wonder if she’s full of worries about my father. My siblings. Me.

      The night of the terrible crash came right after three days and nights my father never made it home. Not home late as usual. Not home early or late. Not ever. No father for three days. No warnings in the morning from my mother to the younger kids, Shhhh. Hush all that noise, youall. Shush and eat your cereal. You know your father’s sleeping. You know you better not wake up your father. No father’s snores when I pass the bedroom landing on my way to school.

      On the bad night my father returns early. Nine, ten o’clock. Very early for him, anyway, and he knocks softly then fumbles in his deep pockets for keys to let himself in. My mother’s out. Very late for her. A rare night she’s not home, and good boy me has performed his duties, bedded down the other kids at the exact hour, in the precise fashion, almost, my mother commanded. Don’t be mean to your little brothers and sister. Firm but nice with them. And don’t you dare sit up waiting for me like you think you’re my mother. Soon enough I’ll be sitting up all night worrying because you think you’re grown enough to run the streets till dawn, she said. But I couldn’t help staying awake.

      Music’s playing in my head, fast and slow, rhythms change, words СКАЧАТЬ