American Histories. John Edgar Wideman

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СКАЧАТЬ not here, is what I thought. She’s just up there—teacher not person—and we’re just kids, not people either, her captive audience, and we aren’t supposed to notice or be distracted by her body, history, identity, her personality in a classroom quiet as a grave except for taps and scratches of her writing on the blackboard. She’s nobody in particular. Anonymous as a cop with a bullhorn blasting orders to an unruly crowd.

      Her back mostly turned to us, Mrs. Cosa speaks over her shoulder in a manner that conveys nothing about herself, about us, except her tone of voice makes it clear she is not herself, not anyone, nor are we. We understand we must not miss the information her words are imparting, because without it we would certainly be less than the little we are, and we are nothing really anyway, nor is she. No matter how she’s dressed, her age, size, years of teaching experience, it’s not about her. Or us. Only rules, words on the blackboard count, her voice informs us. They count and belong to a larger, more significant world, basically inaccessible to her or to us. The importance of that other world apparent as it materializes in words she recites and inscribes on the board. Even our small minds can grasp the difference between that other place and this makeshift classroom where we have turned up to be exposed to something greater than we are or anything we might imagine on our own.

      Rules and words incontestably not us, and for that reason we’re correct to ignore her, the teacher, and ignore ourselves, a group of students incontestably not present, though here we are, too, and we better take down in our workbooks the rules, words she doesn’t exactly fling over her shoulder or sprinkle like a farm lady feeding chickens. But we ought to be grateful as chickens. Our lives at risk, at stake if we don’t pay attention or even if we do. We better gobble up what little we can of those words and rules to guide us in a dangerous, unforgiving world we will occasionally awaken from sleep to find ourselves immersed in, surrounded by.

      In the morning, eavesdropping on sounds that drift up through the floor, occasionally I hear a radio or TV playing somewhere, in an empty room I believe, nobody listening to an announcer’s voice all business, articulating snippets of news that fade, dissolve before I’m able to identify a single word, and I regret I didn’t flat-out ask Mrs. Cosa the shape of the world.

      Of course, no fourth-grade teacher, then or now, could answer my questions about where or how an unknowable world begins or ends. I don’t blame Mrs. Cosa, even feel sorry for her. Not her fault I kept my question inside myself. Big crush on her once, piece of chalk in her hand, a small, neat, pale white lady all alone up there in front of us in her cat-eye glasses. Then again I’d get furious with her for reminding me we were all of us, teacher, room, school, hopelessly lost. Nowhere in fact. She’s a turd, a stinking, ugly speck of shit floating around on the back of a roach with us till we all fall off again and land deeper in mucky nowhere.

      If Mrs. Cosa heard me think that, I don’t believe she’d be angry or hurt or insulted. She might even nod, Yes. Yes, but she’s not responsible for what she is, is she. Doesn’t know, does she. She’s just there where she is. Like us in our seats or desks or boxes or emptified heads. Somebody else or some giant animal maybe squatted and pooped us, pooped her in front of us so don’t ask. She didn’t do it. Doesn’t, couldn’t know the answer. Words and rules not her, not hers. You shitty kids, what she would probably think or say about us if her mind were not busy performing this part of the job she’s paid for. Rules. Words. And we’d probably agree. You’re right, Mrs. Cosa. Yes. Yes, a pipey chorus of kid voices.

      Reading a story or writing one, I hope the world will be different at the point the story ends. Same wish that motivates me some mornings to sit in the bathroom and listen for sounds, for silences telling me I am not the silence that surrounds me. Signs that assure me I possess a shape that belongs to me, and it can poke its way through silence, get on with a life. A different life I can’t imagine. Except as difference. Except as unknowable.

      World I want to be different is not like fictions stirred up by words on a page, not one that starts where its words start and finishes with the last word like any story I can choose to read or not or stop reading or stop writing and do my time elsewhere. The different world I long to inhabit is the one inhabiting me, no beginning or end. This world where I’m stuck forever, however long that might be. Me and everything else and nothing. Same space, same shape, same thing I am.

      So I wait. And wait and listen and wait while the unknown drips somewhere, drop by drop like a leaky faucet in a bathroom I almost can hear from mine. Dripping drops of it accumulating in a sink until the sink overflows, and a flood faster than the speed of light takes everything with it wherever it goes to vanish. No mess left behind for anybody to clean up, no stories with a person inside waiting.

      MY DEAD

      Edgar Lawson Wideman: sept 2, 1918–dec 14, 2001

      Bette Alfreda French Wideman: may 15, 1921–feb 7, 2008

      Otis Eugene Wideman: march 6, 1945–jan 11, 2009

      David Lawson Wideman: may 7, 1949–oct 19, 2014

      Monique Renee Walters: nov 21, 1966–feb 6, 2015

      I list my dead. Father. Mother. Brother. Brother. Sister’s daughter. For some reason their funeral programs share a manila folder. During a bad ten months I had lost a brother, a niece, and they joined the rest of my dead. The dead remembered, forgotten, adrift. The dead in a folder. There and not here. Dead whose names never change. The dead who return secretly, anonymously, hidden within other names until they vanish, appear again.

      March 6, the date I noted in my journal after I had compiled a list and returned the programs to their folder, happens to be my brother Otis Eugene’s birthday, a date like others in the list, I tend to forget, as he is often forgotten when I revisit family memories. My younger brother Otis who survived our unforgettable mother barely a year. My quiet, forgettable brother, his birth separated from mine by four years, by twins, a boy and girl, neither living longer than a week.

      Their deaths, of course, a terrible blow for our mother. She never spoke of those lost babies, and late in her life denied to my sister that the births had occurred. No dead twins in the four-year interval between me, her eldest, and my next brother, Otis. Other siblings arrived after the empty four years. New lives, two years separating each birth from the next, regular as rain, until five of us, four boys, one girl in the middle. With her hands full, heart full of caring for the ones alive, why would my mother allow herself to sink back into that abyss of watching two infants, so perfectly formed, so freshly dropped from inside her, leave the world and disappear as if her womb harbored death as naturally as life.

      My brother was named Otis for our mother’s brother and Eugene for our father’s brother. Uncle Otis was very much alive, but Uncle Eugene dead already or soon to die on Guam, when my brother born. Uncle Eugene dying needlessly, or, you could say, ironically, since war with Japan officially declared over, a truce in force the sniper who shot Eugene didn’t know about or perhaps refused to honor because too much killing, too many comrades dead. Why not shoot one more American soldier beachcombing for souvenirs where he had no right to trespass, no palpable reason to continue to live in the mind of an enemy whose duty was to repel invaders, to follow in his rifle’s scope their movements. Not exactly easy targets, but almost a sure thing for a practiced marksman, even a sniper very weary, beat-up from no sleep, constant harassment of enemy planes, tanks, flamethrowers, a shooter trained to take his time, forget hunger, thirst, his dead, his home islands far too close to this doomed Guam as he gauges, tracks his prey, picks out a brown man who will surely, fatally fall before the others scatter for cover, before he, himself, is observed or snipered on this day he’s not aware the war’s over or is aware and doesn’t care as he chooses someone to kill, freezes the rifle’s swing, stops breathing, squeezes the trigger.

      Uncle Otis, like our father and our father’s СКАЧАТЬ