Tidewater Geechee

By Lawrence Jackson

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Eugene was whipped again for his pissing in bed... I made Eugene drink a pint of piss... [M]y Eugene ran away this morning for no reason but because he had not done anything yesterday. I sent my people after him but in vain.
—William Byrd, The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover 1709-1712

My being is nothing. It took years for me to become a proper Negro, and when Maecenas offered to bestow the laurel wreath, it clung to me more as a purple shroud, or rather, a snug zippered shirt. This phenomenon fills me with a particularly deep anxiety, a cringing form of despair. I am concerned because my life seems to follow along a path of sustained contradictions and paradoxes, ambiguities and episodes of "coming full circle" in the idiom of the old people from my village. And yet, everything that I have wanted has been wrong and along the way I have acquired appetites the sustenance of which causes me no small degree of bitterness. It is clear that I am undisciplined. My friends have been solemnly counseling me to make an appointment for the penitentiary, to think of the errand with the same gravity that one might devote to registering for a class at a community college. Only a semester's worth of work. They are as convinced of the institution's utility as the prisoners are. Routines are at least a suitable substitute for will and belief, if they are not its essence. But I am so undisciplined as to be easily bored by routines. Anything that works, time in and time out, begins to bore me or worse, it seems I am unfairly cheating life to play to a recognized strength of my own.

Black was White and White was Black until I became an Arab, or from Asia Minor to say the least, and I am not a Muhammadan at all, though the words Al Naqba I have considered tattooing on my forearm. I am certain that I do not know who I am and I am certain that I am to be ashamed of that fact. Look, I say in the voice of the famous imperativists, I accepted the notion of motion, of subatomic particles, of physics and science in my search for myself, but my presumptions only led me farther out of range. All I can see is the process of metamorphosis and changing, molting particles and swirling energies, never the static entity. I see phenomena yes, but only its tiny constituents through the microscope and I find bacteria in the composition and other viral parasites nourishing themselves off me. There is no pattern or fabric or weave. No border, liminal zone, interstices or satisfying plateau. I have tried to anticipate being there, but have failed utterly at being here. Maps of x, y, or even z fail to list my coordinates, if I only had ordinates. I am lonely and yet I have a stated tendency towards misanthropy; in conversations and personal relationships I tend half-ways toward evanescence. Yes, I have become acquainted with ambivalence, and it will not leave me be. Be me, the two most consequential words in the language, and if I only knew my patois then I could effortlessly substitute me for all of those "I"s running around. But what made me make that choice? What stimulated these rather nugatory pursuits? What lead me along this path of neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, poor nor middle class? Why did I look for something tangible to lay all of that responsibility for being upon, only to find out that it is me, the inchoate, who is responsible, all of the time? Excuse me for sounding so shrill, but perhaps my consternation is understandable. I re-sign.

I was born in a great city in the socket of the Chesapeake Bay. The year of my arrival was a time of global riot and correction, the assassination of a great leader and the failure of great doctrine, so it would be difficult to say if it was the great City of the Bay or not. Baltimore was a broad expanse of brick the color of steamed hard-shelled crabs that the Nanticoke and Lenape showed Calvert and Crossland how to eat. The streets and walkways beamed with marble and asphalt, cobblestone and rounded brick, pebble and gravel, and the myriad dwellings evolved from Federal row-houses and Northumbrian farms bragged multi-colored formstone, slate and sheets of pastel-colored paint, all of it coated and stirred in a rich, slave-backed grain. One hundred and seven years after Biddle's moment inaugurating the Revelation, the City looked grimy. Its wharves and docks crumbled in neglect following the end of the steel-era heyday, which brought my mother's family up from country. The red brick and marble glories were past. The doyen Mencken had left us with no Pilsner; National Bohemian soon closed. Even the great Austin Woolfolk, who had taken money from his coffles and his breeding plantations and put the snatch into that quixotic dream of a railroad to Ohio, even that great seer and be-er, had tracks collecting rust. The people sensed doom in the port City ringed by massive forested hills. Like troops broken and defeated in the valley, my kinfolk moved from the Sandytown stretches north and westward, to the Hilltop and the Heights.

I sought my integrity out of a brick row house with a front and a back yard, a house nestled between twin arcing Heights, both thoroughfares beginning their climb at the City's rambling sanctuary of Scottish riters, the Druid Hill Park. Our street had been created in the booming real estate market following the last war to end all wars, and the squat brick homes (leagues different from the slender Federal style row-houses of Sandtown) had sold for as much as five thousand dollars. By the time my parents bought a home the houses were selling for three times that amount to schoolteachers, mechanics, postal workers, dry cleaners and state of Maryland employees. It was the only home my parents had ever owned; I do not believe that they ever thought of leaving, even when the market boomed in the late 1970s and the value nearly doubled. (That was the year my sister was in private school.) The neat rowhouses had distinctive sloping front lawn, hills in miniature; an Edwardian garden brought to a scale comprehendible to the American assembly line worker and reader of the funny pages. We thought that our low-built and sturdy brick sphinxes were superior in their way, the virtues of the rough-edged brick outriding the vogue of the late 1960s era: aluminum siding.

The avenues climbing up from the shore were broad highways covered by towering maple trees that caused the sidewalks to ripple and burst. Park Heights and Liberty Heights, leading up the forested hill, were the great corridors of my youth. For a generation, the Heights had been the home to many Jews, refugees from the Cossack pogroms, survivors of Saxon hygiene, turned back by Brits at Palestine, and settled on the humid shores of the Bay. When they came they brought all of their specialties: bakeries, delicatessens, gems and appraisers, garment stores and the rococo domed halls that they used for worship. Around the time that Rev. Dr. King was slain, they left the City to us, and my grandparents became paupers.

My village, whose name was a corruption of the word "Old Field" prized respect and appearance over achievement and obedience over ambition. While there was a certain disdain for technology among us (in favor of labor and parsimony), it has often been said that Americans are Babbit-style conformists and, inside of that condition, because of the intermittent nastiness of slavery and segregation, Black people should be liberals. Yet we were so conservative and always wanted to appear as though we didn't lack for anything. The obeisance to show and decorum had a clear source; my grandparents worked as servants for well-to-do White people. I am not ashamed of this in some sort of backhanded way and, to cover my shame, am stating the facts too baldly. For I could offer euphemisms for what they did; I could say that the work was no different than being a waiter or so forth. I suspect that it was different, but as I have asked again and again, Who am I to ask such questions? And as I have been told by people since the time I have been certain that the spring precedes summer: You are nobody to ask those questions. At that point if the seer is in a vivid mood or in touch with their ancestors, they will prescribe my future for me, which, as one might imagine, is rarely as pleasant as their own; or if more pleasant, deeply flawed, because it requires no purposeful activity on my part, no real agency, no fundamental humanity. So I have tried to accept my fate: I am nothing. Of one thing I have become more and more confident; so many people cannot be wrong! Perhaps there is a kernel of wisdom hiding among the shucks of my ear. And still I cannot cease wondering what brought me to such a state of arrears. If only I could cease wondering at what brought me to this state of arrears.

Perhaps the mystery lies in the clan. My maternal grandfather was butler and chauffeur to wealthy garment merchants of Jewish German stock: the Hecht's or the Hoschild's or maybe the Kohn's. This information seems to be all that I know about him, besides a bawdy story my mother's aunt once told me. In his day my grandfather Pops was nicknamed Buck and his brothers and their wives shamed him for not working in steel. None of those steel-drivers lived long enough to come to his funeral, for Pops died at 67, quite old by Negro-man standards. Hecht's is still hanging on to its business in the face of the national monopolies of Macy's and Nordstrom. (Personally I hope that a Ghanaian and a Bombayian combine will put a store together bringing us spices, mud cloth and madras in heavy cotton robes, all in a climate controlled, insect free, multi-floor, brightly lit mausoleum.) After he was fired from his job, for nipping I have surmised, my mother's father worked as an after-hours janitor. All of those years of servitude and fidelity and the inevitable ample pension, gone with a tumble of Old Forester. I loved to bundle with my mother and sister into our Volkswagen Beetle to go downtown to pick him up. Pops always smelled of cigars and basements and he was very gentle, and for some reason or other, though the memory seems confused, I hear him speaking some form of softened dialect, and if he did, I can feel my mother cringe with embarrassment. But perhaps I am confusing him with our neighbors Mr. Grant and Mr. Pitts, two of the most formidable speakers of Virginia or high Carolina patois whom I have ever encountered, a patois a bit more eclectic and obscure than the Caribbean Creoles, because the speakers have no famous rituals, regularly celebrated, where one can hear the language celebrated in its rawest timbre. We always thought that Mr. Grant was talking like Fred Flintstone. Yabadabadoo. His son Allen used to translate for his father to us kids, and Mr. Pitts rarely said more than his version of "How do you do" and "God be with you" as he clambered in and out of his battered pick-up. His toothless conversation always took place at the upper decibels and we were fortunate that his voice did not have a very high pitch. We learned as young people an important skill: smile and nod our heads in acquiescence to that which we did not understand.

My maternal grandmother, whom I knew better than my grandfather because she outlived him by almost 30 years and spoke a great deal more (I used to think that there were some special rules where men were not allowed to speak in the house), worked as a Registered Nurse, in home care, again, mainly for Jews. She was a very fair skinned woman (though fairly Negroid looking in her way to those of us to whom such distinctions are significant) proud of, perhaps too much, her ability to use the front door. The front door blinded my grandmother to other political possibilities. She raised my mother in the latter years of the Depression amidst the gilding that their employers bequeathed on a street with mostly Jews and my grandparents thought themselves special for being able both to buy a house and to live on a block outside of the real-estate red pencil. No renting a room with dozens of country relatives for them. In effect, they raised my mother in the teeth of a segregated colored world as a young Jewess. My mother's deepest longings and yearnings have nothing to do with the yam, but were more of the nature of the shtetl. But my grandparents' struggle upward became a moot point when urban renewal tore down the house in the Jewish block and they moved to Northwest Baltimore, where two Negroes in their sixties could pay for a house.

In my grandmother's block of Pimlico Road, five blocks down the street from the world-renowned Pimlico Racetrack, all of the neighbors always prided themselves on being the first Negroes to move on the block when it was "nothing but Whites" or "only Jews," none of "us" on "the block." I heard most of the observations thirty years later, and they were always made with a glance, furtive or sly, towards the corner of mumbling winos, rock stars, and seventh grade sharpies. Then the eyes would sweep the curb, overflowing with tiny bottles, green-tinged glassine bags, and empty shorties of Crown Royal. Everyone that I have known remains delighted by the achievement even after the time has passed, after their children have succumbed to AIDS, spent their vital years in the penitentiary, produced children and raised none, or simply fled. A sign of unusual competence is holding a steady job and living with one's parents. It seems the crowning achievement of Black life, to live, or to have lived, among the Whites. Second best was having a fenced-in front yard, and that struggle for second place has grown so competitive that a nearby family on Woodland Avenue cemented a three-foot wall to mark off the ground in front of their row house.

My father's mother was given her Cleveland, Ohio, home (and it nearly seems her second husband, the Arkansasan) in the will of the woman for whom she had cooked for so long. Everyone always loved Virginia's cooking. My grandmother was from Roanoke, Virginia. Maybe because Roanoke is hill country with, I would guess, an enduring legacy built on a heritage of small plantations and hill-billyish independent Whites, who might have been uncomfortable with slavery for sound economic reasons, she never got along too well with my father's natural father, Grandpa Jackson.

My father's step-father, the title a bit of a misnomer since my father never lived under the roof with the man, was your typical Arkansas refugee born between 1890 and 1910. In other words, Tommy Rowe kept a firearm and ammunition in every room of his house; he never got beyond the war of 1921. And there was nothing Negro in his appearance except perhaps his capacity for sullenness. Tommy liked his eggs soft and More brown cigarettes and he bought my sister and even me scratch-off lottery tickets when we walked down to the drugstore with him during our summer vacations to the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio. When his brothers, heavy brown men, came to bury him, they parceled out his rifles and shotguns and pistols. I kept his prized 38.s and collected all of the unique ammunition: dum-dums, hollow points, penetrator rounds, and so on. Of these men, the pistols are the only real legacy left to me; I ponder the nature of this most complex inheritance.

My biological grandfather was from Danville, Virginia, which is on the County line with North Carolina, and is flat, perhaps better suited to large farms and that wonder crop tobacco. I only remember the dust and the railroad spikes and the singing of the CSX locomotives from our summer-time trips to the country and, of course, I remember that Grandpa Jackson didn't have indoor plumbing. The outhouse had cobwebs, but was not repulsive; though seated over the hole I thought it odd. I don't think my mother ever used the outhouse. This was in 1974, and I only learned years later that we didn't stop at the Howard Johnson's for lunch not only because Dad was tight-fisted, but also because he wasn't of that generation. Of course the discipline, no meals on the southern road, was all to the good to me because we stayed at a hotel in Danville with a sliding board and a Long John Silver's, where they sold such delicacies as chicken fingers: White meat without a bone. On these trips my father craved fresh tomatoes, corn, greens, cornbread and smokehouse cured ham, none of which did I then find as delicacies.

But Danville's traditions didn't entirely suit my grandfather, and though family lore has it that Great-grandma Jackson, nee Less Hundley, had no problem putting the riding boss in his place with her mighty right cross, her son Nate took to the railroad and to the fast life. That is probably why Virginia Jefferson liked him. But their marriage didn't last and a locomotive fireman makes many, many stops. My father was raised by his mother's aunt and uncle, in the traditional Negro fashion, which he in turn had the effrontery to despise, though shame was unknown to the man. His parent's marriage fell apart and it seems the wisdom of the eons that Negro young adults are not quite prone to raising their offspring together. There seems to be a competition for recognition between the parents, though now I am sure to sound like Cole Blease.

My parent's affair began in college during a time when my mother was contesting her piety and submissiveness. She had skipped two grades in elementary school and for many years was socially ill at ease, convinced that the promotion had been not merely a mistake, but a bureaucratic oversight that would inevitably be corrected. Her natural tendency was to exist in a constant state of alarm; every stern voice, pair of wingtips or coifed head of chemically straightened hair and White gloves, announced her exposure and dismissal. My father, Yo-Yo, shod in the regalia of a Negro fraternity known for its playboy and Epicurean tastes, would write my mother's name inside of a diamond "K" in his copy of Beyond Good and Evil.

Technically, neither of them were what you would call phenomenologists; I am tempted to say somnambulist, but that would be crass and, more correctly, casuistic, my imagining that somehow putting them in their place would improve my perception of myself. No, they wanted the good life, and I foolishly rejected it. My mother was fair-skinned and ample and they vacationed on the New Jersey Cape, delighted to actually imagine themselves living the same lives, breathing the same air, wearing the same style clothes, as a Kennedy or a Vanderbilt. Of course, they could only really vacation up North in safety. Regardless of the fine points of the destination, every Christmas we had oyster stew.

Thus, I find it difficult to target my parents as the source of my own angst—if anything they are too logical a source for my own deformity. Since my trademark is uncertainty, I am more than a bit hesitant. Nor, I should add, have they readily accepted this burden; frequently they have even tried to forbid me from telling it, particularly the stories of malnutrition. "Never write about the family," was my father's longest running comment to me. My mother is more disingenuous, revealing of a tidbit of crucial memory that would make messier my truth, but only seven years after the information had value. And after arriving at the conclusion that old people who live in violent neighborhoods in the America's Black inner city are being punished for the perfidy of their youth, I conclude that my parents, my mother really, has her own life to struggle for. How could she possibly shoulder the burden for mine?

-- September 12, 2003

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