American Histories. John Edgar Wideman

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СКАЧАТЬ to become a part of family life, always around until I was grown up with kids and my youngest sibling a teenager. We all still remember him fondly, Big Ote to distinguish him from Little Ote, my brother, who also carried the name of the uncle none of us in my generation had ever seen. Except I claimed to recall my uncle Eugene, even though my mother insistently objected, no-no-no you were way too young, just a baby when he left for the war. I persisted in my claim, wrote my first published story to bear witness to his living presence within me, my closeness with a long-dead man more intimate, continuous, and attested, I’m almost ashamed to admit, than recollections I have of his namesake, my brother. A brother who, for reasons never shared with me, preferred to be called Gene once he became an adult.

      Gene, the name everybody I met in Atlanta called him when I traveled there for his funeral. Over the years I had taught myself to say Gene when I addressed my brother in groups not family or introduced him to strangers or on those rare occasions when just the two of us were conversing and I wanted to show him I treated his wish to be called Gene seriously, how once, anyway, in this specific case I would make an effort to forget I was his elder, oldest of the siblings, and follow his lead. Act as if his right to name himself might really matter to me, and for once he could set the rules. My little brother Gene in charge, and me behaving as if he has escaped the box, the traps I spent so much evil time elaborately, indefatigably laying for him during our childhood. Not much use for a younger brother when we were growing up. Except when he served as temporary or potential victim and I was, yes, yes, like some goddamned sniper drawing a bead on an enemy soldier totally unaware his life dangled at the end of a thread in my fingers.

      Gene. In Atlanta the name didn’t sound like the affectation I had once considered it, my brother’s rather late in the day, thus partly funny, partly irrelevant and futile striking out for independence. An attempt perhaps to wipe the slate clean by rebaptizing himself and answering only to a name he had chosen. A not-too-subtle effort to cancel prerogatives and status other members of the family had earned over the long haul of growing up intertwined, separate and unequal. Like the privilege I had granted myself, no blame or guilt attached, to seldom phone him. To not recall or acknowledge him whatsoever for long stretches of time if I chose. My forgettable brother.

      Now I concede it was less a matter of qualities he possessed or didn’t possess that caused him to be forgettable, but my presumptions, my bottomless unease. Wasn’t I the most worthy, important brother in the family, the world. The one who, therefore, must occupy all space available, even if no space left for anyone else. Forgetting a brother a convenient tactic to ensure I never found him in my way. An annoyance. A barrier. A ghost.

      I went to Atlanta to bury a brother and found Gene. Not Otis or Little Ote. Not Otis Eugene. Once my brother chose Gene as his new name, I stopped associating that name with the uncle who had died in the Pacific war. Eugene whose big sneakers I believed I remembered seeing on live feet. People in Atlanta who knew my brother had probably never heard of Eugene, our dead uncle. When they talked about a Gene, the name transformed me into a stranger, an intruder. I recalled names I had made up to keep my brother in his place, tease him to tears in ugly games while we were kids stuck in the same small house. Names I’d forgotten after we both left home. Then for years and years almost no name necessary for him. Few occasions arose to speak of a brother or speak to him or summon him into my thoughts.

      I could have let him be Gene in Atlanta. Isn’t that what he asked. Wasn’t that one reason for his long, self-imposed exile. No trips back home unless someone very sick, dying, dead. Another city, another state, another start with another name he had picked. A new family, not necessarily to replace the old but to fill emptiness where maybe he’d always felt homeless or smothered or locked down in spaces like the ones I allowed him. Spaces with room for him only if he stayed in them alone.

      I could have let myself be satisfied with seeing Gene, convinced myself I was saying goodbye to a stranger in Atlanta, but it was him, his neat, pencil-thin mustache, elegant features, my brother’s unbegrudging silence in the open casket.

      MUSIC

      I find my sister in the big, soft chair where I’d usually find Charles. Television playing with no sound. She is asleep until I pat her shoulder and her eyelids flutter. Leaning down closer to her ear I say, “Time for bed, miss.”

      She’s dressed for bed. Probably had been upstairs to bed at least once before she wound up in the chair in front of a muted TV in the living room at three in the morning where I had wandered after bed and sleep failed me, too.

      As I had tipped down the dark stairs, blinks of light from the living room did not help much, and my hand used the wooden banister on the stairwell’s open side to guide me, to remind me that a rail laid atop the steps ran down along the opposite wall, a steel track for an incline that carried a chair up and down, a rail that could trip you up and break your neck if you weren’t careful.

      “Dreamed of my girl,” my sister, eyes shut again, halfway whispers as if worried speaking too loud might disturb somebody’s sleep. Her own. Her dream.

      Dreaming of a daughter who had died only a few months before this visit, whose long illness had confined her to a wheel-chair that required the motorized lift I’d just been avoiding. This is what I think first when I hear my sister’s words, but something soft in her voice had opened to let me enter, and I understand the girl she dreamed of was two girls, my grown-up niece whose untouched room I’m not yet prepared to enter alone, and the baby, not quite two, lost how many, many years ago, and as usual when I recall the one who never grew up, always strangely older and younger than her sister, a song starts to play, silently as pictures moving across the screen until I turn off the TV. That old Spinners song we had danced to in this same room, dark then, too. My niece tiny, fever sweaty, swaddled in a nightgown, me cradling her in my arms, blowing on her brow to cool it with my breath as we swayed, near to sleep like my sister in the chair who bestirs herself, reaches back to plant her palms on the armrests, scrunches her weight forward to get it balanced on her feet to stand. To smile, to go up to bed.

      BONDS

      She struggles to keep him inside her. Not because she knows that in less than six months Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor and this country, flags flying, will join in the slaughter of world war and that child after child, all colors, sizes, shapes, religions, nationalities, including babies like the one she’s expecting, will be gathered up and starved, tortured, incinerated.

      Struggles to keep her baby inside not because she understood the horror of war, understood that once it starts the horror never ends, young men put in uniforms and marched off to save the country or die trying, some of those soldiers young men from her colored neighborhood, two she will never meet except as names on a memorial plaque beside the door of Homewood’s Carnegie public library, where her brother Otis, who made it back from war, used to take her by the hand to borrow books, then years later took her son, men returning she will encounter in the street or in movies or on TV, some full of love for any girl or boy inside her, men who gladly would risk their lives to protect her or her children playing in the streets, but others rotten with war’s hate, men with weapons the government issues and teaches them to shoot, men who would kill, no regrets, any children she’d bear.

      She struggles to keep the baby inside not because she feared terrible pain once she starts to squeeze him out. Pain scalding her they say worse than the hot comb when her mother digs too deep. Told you stop your fidgeting, girl. Holler and jump you make me burn you again. She’d never disbelieved the women’s stories about how godawful the pain. Harder to believe what they said about how suddenly easy it is afterwards, after all the suffering, your insides tearing apart inch by inch, then out comes the baby and it’s a sweet, warm bundle on your chest and you won’t remember why all the screams and carrying-on. Won’t remember you’d been thinking just minutes before you’d rather die than burn one СКАЧАТЬ