The last music he listened to at home was Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom.” It filled our home beginning the Sunday morning after his birthday. Even after he died, there were birthday present ribbons left in the living room. The music was a gift from Marcus, and Ficre played it over and over that sweet Sunday. The sound was delicate and essential, a single pipe note, a blue note, something impending and then sudden, like spring rain. It took its time. And then in came the piano, ever so slightly percussive. The sounds layered and built into a quietly mighty sound. Lateef played varied instruments from different global music traditions, strands of a unified sound. You hear him actually breathe into the bamboo flute and hear his palm on the drum. The music repeated is the warm and human breath in our house that Sunday.
For many years Ficre tended a Natal plum bonsai. We bought it in a shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the way home from a happy trip to Maine. It was a South African variety, which amused us when we happened upon it in New Hampshire. Africa is everywhere, baby, he said, with a smile. It was spiky and flowerless. For two years Ficre nipped and shaped it, watered it, talked to it to coax it into health and bloom. He insisted it live on the kitchen table, in the center of our lives.
One morning we came downstairs and the whole first floor was suffused with a rare and lovely smell. The bonsai had burst its first small, waxy pink blossom. It scented our home and bloomed for several weeks. Orchids would die and I’d throw them away, but he’d set them in the basement to patiently wait for a blossom. “Africans are patient, Lizzy,” he’d say, with a chuckle, but he meant it.
Ficre’s books: Chinese philosophy, organic gardening, Roman antiquity, Paul Cézanne, Hadrian’s Wall, African alphabets. When I was with him, I felt that there was suddenly enough time: to talk, to read, to think, to sleep, to make love, to drink coffee or tea, to practice yoga, to walk. I think that everyone felt that there was all the time in the world when they were with him.
We shared days I can only call divine. I don’t want to fix that last Sunday as the most significant Sunday, though one cannot help but do so. I think of my friend Melvin Dixon—also gone too soon, from AIDS, at forty-two—and his poem “Fingering the Jagged Grains,” a call and response that I took into my body. “What did I do?” I called to my village. The answer came, “You lived, you lived, and the jagged grains, so black and blue, opened like lips about to sing.”