Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 77

She sighed and wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n, wondering what to say and how to say it.

"Your dad had a hard childhood," she began, wondering where to tread and what to reveal.

My innocent eyes compelled her to continue speaking.

"I don't really know how to explain it, because I'm not sure if I understand it myself. He just got tired of poverty and despair."

"But if there's a good bakery there, and other good businesses are there, can it be all that bad?"

"I don't know, honey. But he hates everything that reminds him of there, and he loves anything that's different," she said.

Then I heard her sniffle before her head went down. She wept silently while fingering her wedding band.

That afternoon, my mother's family poured into our home to celebrate my birthday. My mom dished up the cake while my dad served drinks. He kept his gla.s.s filled, and every time he got the chance, he refilled the gla.s.s of my mom's younger sister. She smiled appreciatively and soon she began giggling whenever he approached. Soon, the two of them disappeared. Together.

THING THREE OF THREE.

My mother was gone. She left us at the end of the summer. Just walked away, leaving a note for my father in her stead.

James, I should have known. I should have known that you could never love me when you hate yourself. I thought I could help heal you. Lift you up. Lead you to love, but you never even lit the path.

Know that I don't hate you. I don't hate my sister. I don't hate any of the others. I don't hate my child. Please make sure she knows that. I just need to preserve myself since no one else will.

I love you. Tell Shana that I love her with all of my heart, but I have to go. Please love her, James. Let her know that the skin she's in is not a curse. Make her know that she has a place between black and white.

Elizabeth He folded up her letter and put it in a drawer. He never mentioned her again.

THE LENS.

I fell in love with the lens when I was fifteen. In that stage of swirling emotions, I dug the way I could manipulate the lens and create flatness. Flatness of emotion and energy. Yet if I wished, I could also capture frenzy and excitement. The camera and the lens became my means of control. Despite the circ.u.mstances surrounding me, despite the drama, I could create peace. Thinking of it still gives me a rush, and in my egomaniacal moments, I imagine, just for a split second, what it's like to be G.o.d.

Around my high school, I came to be known as something of a beatnik, what with my weed-smoking and endless supply of black clothes. I was the Herb Ritz of Girls' High. I was the Photography Club and the Art Club. I didn't like taking pictures for the newspaper or the yearbook because the shots were always so staged.

"Here's Becky, the president of Rotary Interact. Smile, Becky."

Click.

"Here's Yolanda, captain of the basketball team. Yolanda, hold up that basketball for us and say cheese."

Click.

Even the ones that were supposed to be candid were fake.

"See the Key Club as they box up the donations from this year's Christmas Drive. Aren't they magnanimous?"

Click.

All people have an image they want to convey, a way they want to be seen. Then, there's the truth. That's what I try to capture on film. The truth. But truth is fleeting. Yet still I try.

HIM.

I've always tried to freeze people in the moment their raw purity is exposed. Those moments just come to me. I can't create them. So I must wait. That's what I was doing the first time I saw him.

He raced into my peripheral vision as I sat on a bench on Thirteenth Street in the heart of Temple University's campus. Leaning my back against the table, my camera resting on my stomach, I felt his heat before I saw him. I fumbled for my camera, my breath catching in my chest as I watched the northbound specimen in admiration. His white tank top revealed his glowing golden skin. His tight shoulders led to arms etched with muscles. His torso was lean; his stomach, flat. His behind was tight and high, and his legs, ripped with muscles, carried him quickly as he sprinted away.

Something stayed with me long after he was gone. Though his face looked relaxed, his hands were drawn into tight fists, telling me that his heart was torn. I wanted to get inside of that torn heart, to mend it from the inside out.

ONE O'CLOCK.

I determined that with his runner's discipline, he was a creature of habit. That habit would lead him back to Thirteenth Street where he would run north like his ancestors had probably done generations before. He would pa.s.s briefly through my life again at one o'clock. I sat ready, like a cheetah waiting to pounce, camera poised to capture his naked edge.

Again I felt his heat before I saw him. I wondered what it was about him that made me sense his presence. It was like I was a heat-seeking missile, and he was my target, only that a.n.a.logy made me feel too predatory. Whatever it was, whatever I called it, it drew me toward him, and I hoped that the camera's eye could catch and preserve it until I could catch him.

I lifted the camera to my eye and pointed it in his direction, moving slowly to match his pace as he approached.

Click.

Calm.

Click.

Ease.

Click.

Despair.

Click.

Peace.

Click.

Pleasure.

Click.

Pain.

Click.

Happiness.

Click.

A nod and a smile at me.

Click.

Got him.

ONCE MORE.

The next day was Friday, and I wanted to see him once more before the weekend claimed him. Camera in hand, I headed toward my usual spot after my eleven-thirty African American Lit Cla.s.s ended. Gladfelter Hall on Twelfth Street was the only place on campus where I didn't feel quite so different. It housed the African American Studies Department and, from the moment I stepped off the elevator onto the eighth floor, I felt at home. Only my own home was not this warm. Anyway, leaving Gladfelter felt like leaving a coc.o.o.n, but it was okay. I could feel a similar heat radiate from him. I knew that I would feel it even more once I was actually able to get next to him.

As I walked up Montgomery toward Thirteenth, something felt different. I felt the heat, but I knew I shouldn't have felt it so soon. I checked my watch. Twelve forty-five. He was early. What was he doing down here?

I slowed my pace and scanned the street looking for him. I spotted him on the other side of the street, also approaching Thirteenth. He waved at me as he pa.s.sed. I waved back, hoping that his feet and heart would guide him to me. Instead, once he reached Thirteenth, he turned left and headed south.

And I was left with my camera in hand, heart on my sleeve, wondering why.

RUNNING.

"So where do you go when you run?" I asked, looking into his eyes.

"It depends on my mood," he said, staring boldly back.

"Explain."

He looked down for a second, as if gathering strength. "I run north on Thirteenth Street when I'm trying to remember-"

"Remember what?" I asked interrupting.

"When I'm trying to remember my roots and where I've been."

"And you run south on Thirteenth when . . ."

"I run south when I'm trying to forget."

"What are you trying to forget, Lionel?" I asked, looking directly into his eyes. Waiting.

"Shana, I believe in being completely honest, but I'm not ready to tell you that yet. Okay?"

"Okay."

We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on Kelly Drive, where I took pictures of boats pa.s.sing along the Schuykill River. As his hand came to rest on my thigh, I felt his heat combine with my own, and the result for me was almost o.r.g.a.s.mic.

Hincty.

BY KAREN GRIGSBY BATES.

FROM The Chosen People.

James Simpson Lee Hastings, Jr. was a chunk of the nineteenth century that had been vomited into the lap of the twenty-first. Simp Hastings; as he'd been known since his days at an East Coast boarding school, had been a moderately competent Boston accountant who had put himself on the mainstream media map by becoming the social arbiter of modern Negro society. His gossipy history of same, Chosen People, had briefly been on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, Hastings had all but quit his day job to make the circuit, describing to innocent and unknowing white people Who Counts-and Who Doesn't-in black communities across the country.

The West Coast swing of a speaking tour had landed him here in Los Angeles, at Ashanti Books, one of the country's biggest and best black bookstores. I'd dropped down to see, firsthand, what all the fuss had been about, and perhaps to get column out of it.

My name is Alex Powell, and I am a journalist. I write a column for The Los Angeles Standard that runs in the Metro section on Thursdays and Sundays, and I'm always looking for good ideas.

This, however, might not have been one of them. Simp Hastings' book had been the cause of considerable ire in several sectors of black communities across the country. Although many of the upper-crust black folks about whom Simp had chosen to write had resolutely refused to talk to him "If we keep quiet," one Philadelphia doyenne had sniffed, "perhaps he'll just go away . . ." A few had cooperated and, augmented by a raft of eager wanna-bes, given him interviews. As a result, Chosen People spent several hundred pages chronicling the "I gots" of a certain kind of black person, and listing the Right Clubs and Organizations to which strivers should strive to belong.

Some of the Negro Old Guard thought Simp suspect as well as traitorous. "Really," grumbled one Chicago doctor; "who is he, anyway? I've never heard of him. My children have never heard of him." A Charleston socialite from a family that had been living in that city for over 150 years simply sighed and said (to one of my aunts), "The bad part is, they get it wrong and we-myself included, I'm sorry to say-don't speak up and correct them when they do."

Black activists who'd struggled for decades to minimize cla.s.s differences among us in the interest of developing a more progressive agenda that would benefit all of us were furious. They felt that Simp was ripping the scab off old hurts covering touchy issues such as skin color, hair texture, and the keenness of one's features. They bitterly mocked his now-trademark inquiry to every new acquaintance: "Do I know your people?"

So here I was, at 7 P.M. on a rainy Monday night, crowded into a standing-room-only group of people who'd come to be given The Word from J.S.L. Hastings, Jr., as he was listed on the book's cover.

The room seemed to be about equally divided between business-suited professionals and afrocentrically-dressed people in cowrie-tipped dreadlocks and clothes from the Motherland. The room quieted as Hastings stepped to the podium.

"Good evening," he began.

His voice was high-pitched and boyish, like Mike Tyson's. But unlike Tyson's Bronx accent, Simpson's was a carefully-aped Locust Valley Lockjaw, a nasal, almost whiny voice, kind of like millionaire Thurston Howell III's had been, on Gilligan's Island.

And instead of the onetime heavyweight champ's ma.s.sive body, James Simpson Lee Hastings, Jr., was tiny, elfin. His skin was a deep, unattractive yellow-almost orange-as if he'd just gotten over a severe case of jaundice. His hair crunched in poorly suppressed waves all about his head. There was less of his chin than there should have been, proportionately speaking, and his nose stuck out of his flat-cheeked face like Pinocchio's.

Hastings did possess two saving graces, however: He had a magnificent set of teeth-white, even and natural-and beautiful eyes that I'd seen change color from bright green to gold to light brown, depending on what he was wearing.

Tonight they were greenish, and fairly snapping with excitement. And maybe just a little malice. Hastings shot his cuffs, straightened his tie, took a drink from the gla.s.s of flat mineral water that had been carefully placed at his elbow, and smiled out at the a.s.sembled.

"Good evening," he cooed to his audience, again.

"Good evening," the audience dutifully responded.

"Wha.s.sup?" yelled some wag from the back.

When the laughter subsided, Simp Hastings continued.

"What's up, indeed? That's why we're here tonight, isn't it?-to discuss what is up with the depiction of black people in this country. For too long, the only images of us have been of happy slaves, buffoons, or criminals. Today when the media writes about 'real black life,' it's always welfare mothers with eight children and no daddy, g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, and crack addicts."

There were murmurs of a.s.sent from some in the audience.

"Well, I'm sure those people do exist-I know they do-but those people are not my people. My people get up and go to work every day, and they are successful at what they do . . ."

"Uh-hum," a fiftyish lady in a burgundy tweed suit murmured, nodding in a.s.sent.

"My people live in lovely homes, with original art on the walls and inherited silver in their sideboard drawers . . ."

Two women my mother's age nudged each other as if to say "Finally!" while a young woman with expensively monogrammed everythings-purse, tote bag, shoes, and earrings-waved her hand, revival-style, in the air and said "Tell it!"

"My people have been summering with other people like them, in the same places for decades . . ."