As Lie Is to Grin Read online

  The pattern had appeared on a gate my mother bought for the front door last spring. I realized that some further connection existed between the Akan culture, the gates, and the Europeans—easy to decipher, but of which I was ignorant. I carried these thoughts down Malcolm X Boulevard, toward the 2/3 station at 135th Street, where my eyes were arrested by a mural on the west side of Harlem Hospital. It was a triptych—three panels showed three different scenes. The northernmost was filled with the image of a black male conductor in a white suit, wand in hand, with a black man dancing in the background. In the second panel, a black male professor, black male student, black female doctor, and black female typist were captured mid-assignment. The third and last—a black farmer, his wife, and their child look out upon the city and a hot-air balloon. I had seen the art project in Harlem: Two Centuries of Architecture. It was followed by an account of New York’s white citizens rallying around the removal of the mural in 1936. They believed “future generations” would not want to see this image on the front of their hospital. I thought to enter but did not. To view artwork in a hospital was too close a reminder that art is created out of others’ misfortune. I paused in the street again, this time looking back at the steps I had taken—north, east, south—finding logic in my winding procrastination. I did not want to go to class yet. I grinned, though I was not certain why, which made me grin even wider, before I determined that these ritual trips to Harlem I made were not just to evade Melody’s detection, but were also some sad attempt to redeem my mother. Everything I saw reminded me of her in some way that could have been sentimental if not for the state of our relationship. I was not in Harlem, I thought, but between Harlem and a place I had created through my mother’s memory, also named Harlem. As I walked up the block, I could see my face in the rearview mirror of a silver pickup truck. I stopped there for a moment and looked at the way my lips spread, and suffered the impression that I was no longer clean. Not a slight uncleanliness that could be washed off in the shower. I tried to get to the bottom of this feeling, but my head began to vibrate, causing me to pause at the side of the road and sit back on my heels. There was a four-story brownstone in front of me that had a crescent-shaped balcony on the second floor. The sun had just passed behind a cloud, and as I looked to the ground the weight of this building pushed down on me. I blinked, then looked back up to see a branch of the New York Public Library named after the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, where the mansion had just been. It was far more ugly than what had stood in front of me before, which, I now realized, had been a figment of my imagination.

  Inside the atrium were two statues of Countee Cullen attached by the same white wooden base. One was bronze and cut off at the waist. It was caressing the cheek of a white bust of Cullen, whose head was adorned with a wreath. I stood behind the bust and read:

  ONLY THE POLISHED

  SKELETON, OF FLESH RELIEVED

  AND PAUPERIZED, CAN REST AT

  EASE AND THINK UPON THE

  WORTH OF ALL IT SO DESPISED.

  I walked to the front desk, not sure where to start, or for what I was searching. “Do you have any books on Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer?”

  “You might want to try next door.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Schomburg Center next door. They have a lot more books.”

  “Would you mind just checking for me?”

  She stared over her glasses before typing the information into the keyboard. “It says there is a book of letters by Toomer that references Cullen.”

  “May I see the letters?”

  “You may.”

  After the librarian directed me to the book, I thanked her and sat in the corner at a table for four.

  The letters were not organized by recipient, but by the year in which they were written. I skimmed for names I knew, reading a letter from Toomer addressed to Alain Locke: “Of the two questions raised; why are universities sterile? And why are undergraduates stones.” I learned, “Countee Cullen bought the first copy of Cane on sale . . . W. E. B. Du Bois liked it despite its modernist prose . . . Toomer began turning down requests for his work to be included in Negro anthologies,” which was not something I had read about him before. I turned the page, to a letter Toomer wrote to his white mentor Waldo Frank. “A few generations from now, the negro will still be dark, and a portion of his psychology will spring from this fact, but in all else he will be a conformist to the general outlines of American civilization, or of American chaos. In my own stuff, in those pieces that come nearest to the old Negro . . . the dominant emotion is a sadness derived from a sense of fading, from a knowledge of my futility to check solution.”

  I went back to the introduction and read that Toomer had not even lived in Harlem during the Renaissance; he had stayed in Greenwich Village, on East Thirteenth Street. I put down the book, which was beginning to disgust me, and headed to the public computer, then typed “Jean Toomer” into the browser and skimmed over the images I recognized, until I saw a picture of him from the 1950s. Nathan “Jean” Pinchback Toomer was hunched over a pile of papers on his desk, wearing a dark jean jacket and staring down at the pages of a manuscript, like a man who had lost his mind by focusing too closely on the work. I felt heat coming from beneath my skin. I looked up from the computer, scanning to the right, and the bronze torso of Countee Cullen stared at me from behind his white clay bust.

  YET DO I

  MARVEL AT THIS CURIOUS

  THING: TO MAKE A

  POET BLACK, AND BID

  HIM SING

  I returned to the front desk and requested a biography of Jean Toomer.

  As the ’20s roared on, he became a disciple of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, and by the ’40s he was a Quaker. It wasn’t that he had wanted to become white. Toomer could trace his origin to nine different ethnicities. Any stress placed on one of his racial distinctions was false. Something was still bothering me, and in my thoughts about Jean Toomer an unnerving question popped into my head. Was my desire for Melody caused by a desire to be whiter? As I turned that thought over in my mind, a body crashed into the chairs on my right side. Two men, both over the age of forty, were wrestling. I stood up. The security guard came to separate them, and now they were on either side of me. The smaller one looked in my direction and said, “I better never see you in Harlem again. You better never come back to Harlem, motherfucker.”

  Through the tension, the firmly worded threat, I believed the man was gesturing at me. It was a message from the God of Abraham, and his voice was just the vessel. I left the library walking west and felt myself between life and death, black and white, home and Melody’s apartment—all massive or minuscule in tangible or intellectual difference.

  october 23, 2009

  On the bus ride to Manhattan to meet Melody’s father for the first time, I had decided to pick back through Cane. After an hour of reading, I began to feel wrathful. It happened in the chapter entitled “Seventh Street,” where Jean Toomer wrote, “God would not dare to suck black red blood. A nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgment Day.” I was conjuring this same God to do my bidding. Melody had asked me to come over on Saturday, then changed it to Friday, so I faked an illness at school, beginning the act at 10:00 a.m. I was dismissed by noon, which left me enough time to walk over to the bus stop and get to the city by 3:30—one hour before I was supposed to meet Melody and Rick. The journey had left me tired, though not physically, so I walked west to Madison Avenue, passing luxury stores, to Fifty-ninth Street, turning west again to the sound of horse-drawn carriages and the smell of shit, to the south of Central Park.

  Melody’s father had his green-framed sunglasses on, covering his eyes, which had been sensitive all afternoon, or so he said. We sauntered west at an uneven pace, Melody and me slightly behind him. On the corner of Sixty-first Street and Amsterdam, next to the Fordham Law School campus, a ho
meless man sat in a wheelchair. “How are you doing, brother!” he yelled.

  “Maintaining, sir.” The artist listened to the man, who wore a Vietnam War Veteran hat, and had a cart full of boxes and garbage bags. I nodded at him. He met my eyes, then glanced away. Rick dropped a ten-dollar bill into his cup. Melody nudged me. “Classic capitalist guilt exchange,” she whispered. Her father waited for two avenues to pass before he addressed her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Of course he recognizes you, Dad. You give him ten dollars every time.”

  “So it means less? How many people listen to him on the street?”

  “How many pay him?” They continued in this manner as we crossed into Central Park, where tourists drank overpriced coffee in expendable cups. The leaves were beginning to change, and a blond man was taking a picture of his wife in the middle of the bridge we were standing on. It overlooked the ice rink, which had yet to open this season. “We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art together,” I heard Melody say to Rick.

  “Oh, God.”

  “I know.” I looked for faces in the rock formations on the other side of the overpass, then down on the ice rink and back up at the skyscrapers on Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park South before I began to see a bull take shape in the rocks across from us, its tail adrift, its horns pressed forward. It seemed like a sign for my desire to write, but I was not sure what led me to make that association. I returned to the conversation that Melody and her father were having—“Heliopolitan Obelisk. Which has nothing to do with Cleopatra”—but I had no desire to join in. I looked back to the rocks as the bull had stretched to its limit—disappearing in the time that it took Melody to tap me on the shoulder, saying, “You want to eat?”

  While we walked out of the park I imagined running in the opposite direction. I tried to keep calm, telling myself, “These urges are very human,” but Rick and Melody continued to talk to each other, pronouncing all of their words correctly, and their sarcasm became cynical—I could not stop thinking I did not like either her or her father. After we finished eating, I stayed over. Richard locked the door to his room. “He said you could stay.” And I smiled, because I did not have to get back on the train to Long Island tonight and cut writing class tomorrow. Melody brought me back to her room. In the moonlight, I was confronted with her glowing whiteness.

  In the darkness, the only thing vivid is the outline of her birds. I feel my body jerking toward the hallway. My eyelids flutter. The tendon on the sole of my foot is in a ball. I lurch forward. The two doors in front of me are painted white and curved like a bell. There is an orange light coming from beneath the entrance. I appear inside a white padded room on a chair. There are hands on the back of my head. They are feeling my face now, trying to force my eyelids open. I woke up beside Melody with a scratch at the back of my throat. I stumbled around the bedroom, without light, and walked to the kitchen. The legs of a chair moved across the floor. Rick was sitting up and looking at the clock. It was 2:21 a.m. As I entered, he did not acknowledge my presence, which made my sleeping with his daughter feel irresponsible. I went to fill a glass of water from the wood-paneled refrigerator, then he said, “My father grew up in this neighborhood. It didn’t look like this in the forties and fifties.” The glass was full. As I made my way back to the door, he interrupted—“It was called San Juan Hill before. Like the battle in Cuba. A lot of blacks, a lot of Hispanics, you know, from Hispaniola.” He went silent again.

  “It’s a palimpsest,” I said. He did not respond, so I continued, “The Amsterdam Houses, you know, you living here—some of the stuff of the old community remains.”

  “You are smart.” I could see he liked that I had connected him with the neighborhood—though he probably did not want to live in a community with its former residents.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gilbert.”

  “Just call me Rick.”

  “OK.” I watched his facial expression change back to pensive while he continued to stare at the clock: 2:24. I pushed back through the hallway and lay down beside Melody again. From her window, looking east, you could see the little tower that resembled the top of a lit cigarette. I reached the side of her bed, propped her window open, and smoked—like I had seen her do. She rustled in her dream, never quite waking, uttering one word—“timing.”

  october 24, 2009

  When I woke up next to Melody at 10:33, Rick was not home. We dressed quickly and walked up Central Park West, past the Trump International Tower at Sixtieth Street, to the entrance of the park. Melody directed me down the footpath, through a tunnel where she yelled “Hello!” just to hear her voice echo. We sat on the boulders south of the baseball fields and a patch of sand. It was 58 degrees outside. I read that on the digital box atop 1740 Broadway, right beneath the southern end of Central Park; it flashed the weather and time, one after the other, in five-second intervals. She was rolling a joint. Her fingers curled around the bleached piece of paper, and I wondered how many times she had done this before.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “The cops don’t come up here.” She continued at her task, not stopping to look up or breathe, until she was licking the gum on the side of the paper, making the plant mixture into a cone.

  “Does Rick talk to you about his father?”

  “Oh God. Did he tell you about the gambling?”

  “No. He said his father used to live in this neighborhood.”

  “I don’t listen to him when he talks about his dad.”

  “Why not?”

  “His dad was a fake.”

  “A fake?”

  “His father was a complete phony.”

  “How was he phony?”

  “You can’t tell him I told you.”

  “You know I’m not going to tell.”

  “You can’t tell anybody.”

  “What is it?”

  “His father passed.”

  “What do you mean passed?”

  “He was black, and after college, he was white. He grew up here, went to school, stopped seeing his parents, then married my grandmother as Richard Murzynowics.” She chuckled while exhaling a cloud of smoke from the joint. “Rick tried to find his family, but his dad wouldn’t let him, so they had a falling-out. It’s the reason his art was any good.”

  Her eyelids were low from the marijuana; when she turned to face me, the sense that she was involving me in some great deception became palpable. I did not let her know these thoughts, though. I lay on her stomach, and we stared up at the clouds for a while.

  “I have to go.”

  “Why don’t you come over tomorrow?”

  “I have to help my mother with something.”

  “Just come over at night before I go to sleep.”

  “I wish I could.” She frowned, tried to light the joint again.

  On the train ride to class, a homeless man pushed an elderly concertgoing couple out of the way. His socks had been ripped to tan shreds; pus came from the side of one shoe, ankles puffy, legs bent like each step was sending a knife through his shins.

  “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

  His gray locks were interspersed with white tufts. As he passed, I noticed the back of his head was a dark brown—the hair sat against it like a halo. “Change! Change!” He stopped in front of a twenty-something Caucasian man—“Change! Change!” The glasses dipped down the man’s nose as he fumbled in the leather wallet for money—“Change!” He parted with five dollars—“Change!” He found twenty-five more cents and the older man continued to the next car. He opened the door. Noise from the tunnel blew through the cabin; he extended his right arm. The door closed behind him. The image stuck in my mind. His posture—the way he raised his arm, it was like the bronze statue of Countee Cullen caressing his own cheek. I was developing a madness, one in which America
n fiction was becoming part of my life.

  Chapter 5

  My grandmother’s favorite saying was tacked to a placard above the garbage can in the kitchen. “You are too blessed to be stressed.” To its right hung my aunt’s, “Sometimes I get so tired then I think of what Harriet Tubman had to do.” That was Doris. She was overweight with ashen teeth and two hues darker than my mother. In the living room, beneath the picture of my great-grandfather with a pipe in his mouth, Doris kept a bowl of cigarettes. The summer breeze pushed through the screen door, which was ripped in places. I took the fly swatter to the back porch and killed eight bees. She came out with a book in her hand entitled Treat It Gentle. Its cover photo was black and white and featured a man grasping a soprano saxophone, his arms raised and bent at the elbows. When my aunt saw the bees’ small lifeless bodies on the porch, she hit me with the book. I cried. She never hit me again.

  I loved the way Doris told stories more than anything else. Showing me pictures in a photo album, she began: “This was my grandmother, the one from Virginia,” or “my father, the Mason.” Her mother was an angel, supposedly, and by asking no questions, I left my grandmother’s memory as such. “Your grandfather had been a door-to-door salesman for most of his life in Hoboken. Then he worked construction for black families on Long Island. That is how he bought the land this house was built on, and that little plot for the church. He told me he was a child preacher somewhere in Virginia. I think he started after the church was completed, but I am not sure. The Wesleys were always good storytellers. You could never tell their facts from their fictions.”