CHARLES
I was almost ready to go home, but there was one more thing I wanted to do. I wanted to find Charles.
Throughout my stay in Detroit, he had been on my mind. The kids I met reminded me of him as he had been, the middle-aged men made me wonder what he would be like now. I couldn’t walk past the ramshackle houses of the east side without thinking of his mother’s old place in the projects, crowded with crying children and smelling of wet walls, fatback and beans. Old songs on the radio brought back dances we had gone to, girls we had liked. I had spent a year on America’s Corner, and I had missed Charles out there.
Still, something had kept me from looking for him. The last time we met, in that miserable flophouse on Twelfth street, he had been a scared kid on the run from the law, and I was afraid to find out what had happened to him. I had seen too many black men our age, beaten down and defeated, to be optimistic. There was another thing, too. Over the years, Charles had loomed large in my imagination; he had become almost a legendary figure, so much so that I sometimes wondered if I had invented him. I wasn’t sure he would remember me, or want to remember.
One day I told Kim Weston about Charles. “I wish I could find him, but I have no idea where he is,” I said. “He’s not in the phone book. I don’t even know if he’s alive.”
“I’ll find him for you,” she said, and she did.
From an old friend at the Pontiac City Hall she learned that Charles was still living in town. He had an unlisted number, which she wouldn’t give out without permission, but she promised to call him and ask if it would be all right. A few minutes later the phone rang. “Here’s the number,” said the lady from City Hall. “He’s waiting for your call.”
I took a long time before dialing, phrasing in my own mind what I wanted to say. At our last meeting I had confronted Charles as an indignant victim and treated him like a common thief. I could still recall the cold, righteous fury with which I took back my pawn tickets, and the secret relief I felt at being given a reason to turn my back on him and his poor black problems.
But the years since then—especially the last one, in Detroit—had taught me about the pressures and terrors of living without a margin of error. In principle, I had been right to confront Charles; but I had learned that being right isn’t always the most important thing. I wanted, across a gap of almost a quarter century, to apologize to him for the cruel, callous teenager I had been.
I finally dialed the number and he picked it up on the first ring. “Charles?” I asked. I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if I were talking to a ghost. “Do you remember me?”
“Oh man,” he said in his familiar, high-pitched voice. “Oh man, it’s you. I’ve been waiting twenty-three years to tell you how sorry I am.” His voice broke. “I’ve been praying that I’d get a chance to do that.”
Charles gave me his address in a part of town I didn’t know, near the Silverdome. On the way out there I played our phone conversation over in my mind. I had been ready for almost anything—anger, disdain, indifference—but not remorse. It made me uneasy. Life must have been very hard on him, I thought. As I approached his neighborhood I steeled myself, expecting the worst.
Charles’s home was a neat, white, two-story frame house on a quiet, gently rolling street—not at all what I had expected. A late-model Ford van was parked in the driveway. I rang the bell for a long time but no one answered and I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. Then an elderly white man who was raking leaves across the street called out: “If you’re looking for Charles, he’s around back.”
I walked down the narrow driveway past the house. A basketball rim was attached to the garage, and it reminded me of our first meeting, Charles leaping in the air and stuffing the ball. I wonder if he can still dunk, I thought incongruously, and tucked in my gut.
I saw Charles before he saw me. He was sitting on a picnic bench in his large, freshly mowed backyard, drinking a cup of coffee. Under a Detroit Tigers cap his face was rounder than I remembered it, but otherwise he looked the same. On the table next to him, a radio played Ruby and the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come.”
“Hey, Charles,” I called. He turned, grinned, rose with an effort and began walking toward me with a pronounced limp. The sentimental greeting I had prepared vanished. Suddenly I was fifteen again.
“Charles,” I said, “you got fat.”
“Yeah, so did you,” he said. “Oglier, too.” He was twenty feet away.
“You walk like Chester from Gunsmoke,” I said, playing the dozens the way we used to. “You couldn’t dunk a donut.”
“Man, you all gray,” he replied with mock anger. “Look at your beard, you look like a damn rabbi.” We met in the driveway and he grabbed me around the shoulders, lifting me off the ground. “Gotdamn, man, it’s really you,” he said. When he picked me up his hat fell off, exposing a bald head.
“You lost all your hair!” I said, laughing. “You’re an old man.”
“That’s cool,” he said, laughing too. “Ain’t no woman ever asked me for no hair. And Bill,” he said, using my American name, suddenly serious, “I’m a grandfather now.”
Charles’s flight from the law ended with capture; he had spent thirty months in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan. When he got out he married the girl who had been with him that night in Detroit. They were still married, with five children. Charles took their pictures out of his wallet.
“They’re my pride and joy,” he said. “This is my oldest boy, the one that Kathy was carrying that night. These are my son and daughter, they’re both in high school. This little girl is in junior high, and this is my baby, he’s in the sixth grade.” Charles beamed as he handed me the photos. I searched their faces for the wild, fierce young man Charles had been, but there was no trace of him there; these were pictures of secure, happy children.
“They look like great kids,” I said. “They must take after their mother.”
Charles smiled. “They do take after her. She’s a real fine woman. But they know they got a father, too,” he said in a quiet, serious voice.
“Did any of them inherit your athletic ability?” I said.
“My youngest boy is a football player,” Charles said, “but I don’t care nothin’ about football. I tell these kids that sports don’t mean a damn thing. I want to see grades. They all A and B students, Bill, all my kids. My daughter’s going to Spellman next year. They not gonna need no athletic scholarships. Their dad got money saved up to put all those kids through college.”
When he got out of jail, Charles went to work in an auto plant, and later took a job as an orderly in a mental hospital. He had been there fifteen years. “It can get rough out there—I got this limp when a patient kicked me in the hip,” he said. “But he couldn’t help it, he was sick. Some of these patients don’t have anyone to visit them. They don’t have any money. Sometimes I buy them a amburger, or some cigarettes. Someday I’m going to have to meet God, and I want to be able to say I did somebody some good down here, that I did my best.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got religion in your old age,” I joked.
Charles shook his head. “My wife does most of the churchgoing,” he said. “She takes the kids, every Sunday. But I believe in God, and I know right from wrong. And so do my children.” He looked at me with brown, serious eyes. It was as close as we got that day to discussing what had happened between us. Charles, my old mentor from The Corner, was giving me one last lesson about black people: not to expect too little.
“You got any kids, Bill?” he asked.
“Two,” I said. “I’m divorced now.”
“You take care of those kids, Bill,” he said in the tone he once used to tell me to do my homework. “You take care of them, be a father. That’s the most important thing.”
“Come on, Charles,” I said. “I don’t need you to tell me that.”
He grinned, the old Charles. “I’m still older than you, and badder than you,” he said. “I can still tell you what to do, and I can still beat your bootie to make you do it, too. I don’t care how many gray rabbi-ass beards you got.”
Charles and I sat for a couple of hours on the picnic bench, drinking bourbon out of tall glasses and talking about old times. A lot of the kids we had gone to school with were dead; others were in trouble with drugs or in jail. He shook his head at their folly, and at his own good fortune. We both knew that he could have been them.
“I wouldn’t be twenty years old again for anything,” he said. “I was so confused all the time, it was pitiful. I didn’t have nobody to turn to for help, you know? I needed a father. I only saw mine twice, once when I was seven years old, and again just before he died. I always envied you for having a father,” he said.
“How did you know how to be a father?” I asked.
“Instinct,” he said. “I knew what I wanted and what I needed, and that’s what I’ve tried to be for my children. When you don’t have a model, you just got to make things up as you go along.”
One of Charles’s sons came back to visit us. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that gave him a mild, scholarly look and a black-and-orange high school jacket. “Say hello to Mr. Chafets, son,” Charles said. “He’s an old, old friend.”
“Hello, Mr. Chafets,” the boy said, shaking hands self-consciously. “I know who you are. You live in Israel. Dad has an article about you from one of the newspapers. He keeps it upstairs in his bedroom. He said that someday you’d come to visit.” He turned to Charles. “Dad, what’s for dinner?”
“I’ll fix you something when I get home, son,” he said. “First, I got to pick up your brother from football practice.”
The sun was going down when we got back from picking up Charles’s son. The two of us sat in the backyard, drinking the last of the bourbon. “Charles,” I asked, “did you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you weren’t black?”
“Sure I wonder,” he said. “You wonder about all kinds of things. It’s a disadvantage, no doubt about that. There’s still a hell of a lot of discrimination in the world. My children got opportunities I never dreamed about, but opportunities don’t mean nothing if you can’t take advantage of them. And everybody, black or white, needs some help to do that.”
Charles gazed at the large vacant lot just beyond his chain link fence. “Someday I’m going to buy that property,” he said, “and the first thing I’m going to do is have a family reunion. I dream of that, right back there.”
He gestured with his eyes to a large black metal smoker next to the garage. “I’ll be over here cooking bar-be-cue—and you know I can cook some bar-be-cue—and my children and grandchildren will be gathered all around. They’ll even come up here from Georgia. Then at night, everybody will be sleeping in the house, and we’ll all be together. Won’t that be a motherfucker, though; won’t that be a stone motherfucker?”
“You’ve done fine, haven’t you, Charles?” I said. I was feeling the bourbon, and the long, happy day we had spent together.
“Yes I have, Bill,” he said, looking in the direction of his cozy house, where his kids were doing their homework. “It took me some time, and it hasn’t been easy, but yeah, got-dammit, thank God, I’ve made it over.”