Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

She had been given, as a memento, the exchange slip from when my grandmother had been sold, and it was something she carried to remind her of where she came from, but when she finally got a chance to sell it, she did — to a museum curator who came from New York. She used the money to buy herself a secondhand sewing machine. She had other jobs too, but mostly she worked as a cleaner in the newspaper office in the center of town. She came home with papers from all over the country and at night read us the stories she considered the good ones, stories that opened up the windows of our house, simple tales about climbing a tree for cats, or boy scouts helping the fire brigade, or colored men fighting for what was good and right, what our mother called justful.

She wasn’t from the Marcus Garvey choir: she held no rancor nor any desire to go back, but she wasn’t averse to thinking that a colored woman could get herself a better place in the world.

My mother had the most beautiful face I knew, perhaps the most beautiful one I’ve ever known: dark as darkness, full, perfectly oval, with eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a mouth that had a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief. She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.

Up until the age of eight I was allowed to sleep alongside my brothers, and, even after that, our mother would still put me in the bed beside them and read us all to sleep. Then she slipped her wide arms under me and carried me to my own mattress, which, because of the layout of the house, was in the narrow hallway outside her bedroom. I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.

On an August evening when I was eleven, my father walked through the door with a splatter of paint on his shoes. My mother, who was baking bread, just stared at him. He had never before, not once, ruined his clothes while out painting. She dropped a teaspoon to the ground. A little patch of melted butter spread on the floor. “What in the name of Luther happened t’you?” she whispered. He stood pale and drawn, and gripped the edge of the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. He seemed like he was swallowing to steady his voice. He faltered a little and his knees buckled. She said: “Oh, Lord, it’s a stroke.” She put her arms around him.

My father’s narrow face in her big hands. His eyes skipping past hers. She looked up and shouted at me: “Gloria, go get the doctor.”

I slid out the door in my bare feet.

It was a dirt road in those days and I can recall the texture of each step — it sometimes feels that I’m running that road still. The doctor was sleeping off a league of hangovers. His wife said he couldn’t be disturbed, and she slapped me twice on either side of the face when I tried to break past her up the stairs. But I was a girl with a good set of lungs. I screamed good and loud. He surprised me when he came to the head of the stairs, peered down, and then got his little black bag. I rode for my very first time in a motorcar, back to our house, where my father was still sitting at the kitchen table, clutching his arm. It was, it turned out, a mild enough heart attack, not a stroke, and it didn’t change my father much, but it took the wind from my mother’s heart. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight: she was afraid he’d collapse at any moment. She lost her job at the newspaper when she insisted that he had to come sit with her as she cleaned: the editors couldn’t abide the thought of a colored man sifting through their papers, though they saw nothing wrong with a woman doing it.

One of the most beautiful things I ever saw — still, to this day — was the sight of my father getting ready to go fishing one afternoon with some friends he’d made at the local corner store. He bumbled his way around the house, packing. My mother didn’t want him to carry any of it, not even the rod and tackle, for fear it might strain him. He slammed more tackle into the picnic basket and shouted that he’d carry any damn thing he wanted. He even loaded the basket with extra beer and tuna-fish sandwiches for his friends. When a whistle came from outside, he turned and kissed her at the door, tapped her rear end, and whispered something in her ear. Mama snapped her head back and laughed, and I figured years later that it must’ve been something good and rude. She watched him go until he was almost out of sight beyond the corner, then she came back inside and got on her knees — she wasn’t a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart’s future was in a spadeful of dirt — but she began praying for rain, an all-out serious prayer that might bring my father back quickly so she could be with him.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own.

I will not for the life of me forget the sign they painted for me a few years later, after I’d lost two of my brothers in the Second World War over Anzio, and after the bombs had been dropped on Japan, after the speeches and the glad-handing. I was on my way up north to attend college in Syracuse, New York, and they had written on a little sign with my father’s favorite paint, the precious gold that he kept for high-class jobs, and they held it up at the bus station, the placard built strong like a kite with a diamond-shaped back so it wouldn’t flap in the wind: COME HOME

SOON, GLORIA.

I didn’t come home soon. I didn’t come home at all. Not then, at least. I stayed up north, not so much running wild as having my head in books, and then my heart in a quick marriage, and then my soul in a sling, and then my head and heart in my own three little boys, and letting the years slip by, like folk do, watching my ankles puff up, and the next time I truly came home, to Missouri, years later, I was freedom-riding on the buses, and hearing stories about the police dragging out the water cannons, and I could hear my mother’s voice in my ears: Gloria, you’ve done nothing all this time, nothing at all, where have you been, what have you done, why didn’t you come back, didn’t you know I was praying for rain?

I’VE GOT A BODY NOW, near thirty years later, that people think is church-going. I’ve got dresses that pull tight in the rear and keep my bosom from swaying. I thread the left shoulder of my blackest dress with a gold-colored brooch. I carry a white handbag with a looping handle. I wear hose stockings right up to my knees and sometimes I pull on a set of white gloves that go high to my elbows.

I’ve got a voice, too, with an undertow, so people look at me and think that I’m about to break into some old cane-field spiritual, but the truth is I haven’t seen God since those early days when I left Missouri and I’d rather go home to my room in the Bronx and pull the bedsheets high and listen to Vivaldi slide through the stereo speakers than listen to any preacher ranting on about how to save the world.

In any case, I can hardly fit in pews anymore: it’s never been comfortable to slide my body through.

I lost two marriages and three boys. They left in different ways, all of which broke my heart, but God isn’t about to patch any of it back together. I know I made a fool of myself at times, and I know God made a fool of me just as often. I gave up on Him without too much guilt. I tried doing the right thing most of my life, but it wasn’t in the Lord’s house. Still and all, I know that churchy is the impression I’ve come around to giving. They look at me and listen and think I’m leading them towards the gospel. Everyone has their own curse, and I suppose — for a while at least — Claire saw me fitting in that peculiar box.