Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

* * *

“Married and moving house from one coast to the other. This is certainly something to toss around in the salad bowl of the mind,” Dad said in the kitchen. Mom sat. I looked at Solomon’s feet. The paramedics were gone. Mom began to cry.

* * *

Cello was sixteen when she moved in pretty much for good. Her siblings were ten and nine; my brother was thirteen. School was nuts; the country was on the brink. Mom’s Hyde Park white people were terrified, but they didn’t want to say so in front of her. I was about to be eleven and West Chicago was on TV and in flames. People were afraid to go anywhere. The mayor had given the cops shoot-to-kill orders.

Martin Luther King had been murdered, but it was open season on us, Dad said. Nobody was hiding anything from anybody. We watched television with the lights on in every room of the house. One of Mom’s crazies, an alcoholic seamstress, sat with us, crying. When Solomon opened our door to check out the square, Dad yanked him back inside.

It was mine, the fear that night, the kind of being afraid you get when your protectors are themselves frightened. The policemen weren’t lining up to protect marchers. They were killing black people left and right, we heard. These weren’t marchers. Dad was on the phone to the caretakers at the Eagle building, trying to find out what was happening over there. People called with reports of gunfire.

King’s assassination was the first big thing I remembered. Odell’s crew at the ChiChi talked about JFK’s assassination as the first or only time that they saw their fathers cry. But the night of King’s murder was the first and only time I saw Dad tempted to what I believe was racial violence. The caretakers from the Eagle stopped by. Mom and Dad argued. The guys outside honked. He wasn’t risking his person for principle; he was protecting family property. My father went out, into the looting and the Molotov cocktails and rumors of snipers.

A carload of black men in a big, late-model Buick, they got stopped, but not by the cops. By gang leaders, who said they had the situation in their territory under control. I listened from the stairs. Cello, Solomon, Mom’s crazy, and a priest who had dared to creep over sat up with Mom. Supposedly he was trapped with us because of the curfew. It was the first big thing I understood and didn’t want to: my Dad had been sent home.

The pictures of smoking rubble the next day were bewildering. I couldn’t believe that I had to go to school. We were not allowed to go anywhere else. The newspaper’s caretakers came all the way over to drive us the three blocks. They never told Cello and her brother and sister that their father made his wife, his parents, their janitor, and Mrs. Williams hide with him in their basement. Ralston Jr.’s obsession with air-raid shelters began that night. His own mother asked him to move out.

I cried when King was killed, because Mom, Cello, Rhonda, and that priest cried so much. The seamstress staying with us also bawled, turning her thirty-day AA coin over in her hands. I was scared out of my head, but it was also an intense experience to let go, to insinuate myself into their grief, to release into the air my sadness as a musty kid teased at school. I sensed that day that my misery was closer to the alcoholic seamstress’s than it was to Mom’s.

A few years later two commuter trains on the Illinois Central collided outside a station downtown and I understood for the first time the flinty shock of death. A family friend who made what he called antique furniture was among those killed. I didn’t cry, I was so amazed by the discovery. Dad thought I had grown up. I wasn’t paying attention at the funeral. The open casket didn’t faze me. I was fixed on the realization that life was serious; it offered no do-overs. You don’t get up from play and head home wondering what happened to the fireflies of childhood.

* * *

The Eagle hadn’t had any fifty-year anniversary celebrations and its closure three years later was a story only in the black press, down at the bottom of the fifth or sixth page in other black newspapers around the country. EAGLE GROUNDED, one generous former competitor announced.

Uncle Ralston was being kept overnight for observation. Shay Holdings took a limping Mrs. Williams away in disgrace. Dad was driving Ralston Jr. and Aunt Gloria back to the house on South Parkway. One of the caretakers lived with them, but something else would have to be done with the inmates after the house, the rented-out condo in North Carolina, and the closed-up lake cabin in Wisconsin were sold.

Solomon was with Dad, who was taking him back to his hotel. That he and Francesca were staying in a hotel prompted Mom to pull the plug on her day and go down to the basement. She understood that they weren’t staying with Francesca’s parents on North Lake Shore Drive either, but she preferred to talk about it in the morning. She looked forward to meeting her daughter-in-law in the morning. If she met Francesca’s parents in the morning, then that would be fine, too. For her to leave before the last of her guests said something. Solomon looked troubled as Mom gathered up a volume of her Bach Preludes and Fugues that had fallen under a chair.

After a while, I had on one of Dad’s precious Dinah Washington albums. I was probably going to have an interview for a job as a consultant on a local public television program about Scott Joplin at the Chicago Fair. The producer had worked part-time as a starving teenager at the Eagle . Dad got him off the streets. He gave me his card.

“Want to dance?” I asked the attorney. He was sexy enough for me to risk Dad’s sniffing the air when he got back. Now that Mom was downstairs, we were smoking the attorney’s herb in the living room. He didn’t take away the flame he held for me. I blew smoke and thanked him. This was just the kind of situation I would have got myself into in my drinking days.

“No, my man, but knock yourself out. Do your thing, you know.” He loose-walked with the joint to the kitchen, where the women were maybe not young, but they were real.

I tried to flirt with the middle-aged priest. He turned off the record player. This was exactly the sort of thing I would have woken up ashamed over in my drinking days.

* * *

“You look like a panda, Alfred,” I once heard Uncle Ralston say to Dad when Mom was coming back from canvassing outside the steelyards. “Like a lovesick panda booted out of China.”

* * *

A reason for me to take drugs was not to dream, or not to remember my dreams. Stoned, I slept, the livid theater of the unconscious blacked out. Sober, I dreamed of getting stoned. In the dream, I say “Happy trails” to Zippi early in the morning and board the plane to Amsterdam with paper sacks for hand luggage, stoned and seeing spots. De Quincey said that a man who dreams of oxen will dream of oxen even when on opium.

* * *

If Dad noticed anything funny smelling when he got back, it wasn’t as important as getting to their basement hideaway to check on Mom. He left it to me to take care of the people sitting around the dining room and kitchen tables, debating in which direction our black political future lay.

I stared at Manfred’s old telephone number written in that portfolio of photographs from the Chicago Fair. One night in his Schöneberg pub he’d also given me the number of his sister in Bremen. I managed to keep control of myself at what would have been five in the morning for her, though the attorney was the last to leave. The woman he helped into her coat had plush honkers pressed against her sweater and her skirt rode a hippo-huge behind. He stomped around the walls of Jericho, letting the city of her black tights know just what was what.