Looking back now on that strange afternoon of ten years ago in my grandmother’s parlor, it is clear enough that what she divulged to me there, as well as the place of trust she accorded me, had a considerable impact on me, a midterm adolescent of unsuspected merit. She had seen something of value in me, if nothing more than a curious and open mind, and perhaps a certain congenital appreciation of the metaphysical. The bond between us, sealed forever in the tidy little over-furnished sitting room, was one of the two major watershed events in my life. The second event which lay just ahead, I could not have withstood had my grandmother not made me the sole caretaker of her great and improbable secret.
Something else happened on the bus ride home from Duvall Street that day, which I took, in the unusual context of things, to have more significance perhaps than it warranted. I had turned fifteen on May 1, 1960, five months before my grandmother told me the Dogon story. This was a month or so after my family moved from our flat in the Jackson Ward section near my grandmother’s house to a block in the Church Hill section of Richmond that changed from all white to all black within months of our moving there. That night, I took the East End 30 bus on Broad five blocks south of my Grandmother’s house and got off at 37th and M, two short blocks from my house on the corner of 39th and M. My stop was only minutes from the end of the line and no one was on board save the driver and me by the time we reached the next-to-last stop at 35th and M. It was after six o’clock and dark when the bus pulled away from the curb. Just as it was doing so, I heard someone cry out, “Hold up! Hold up!” I called ahead to the driver to stop, which was something drivers, as often as not, refused to do. Business that night, however, was slow and unhurried. The driver stopped. The door hissed and opened to an elderly black man who appeared winded from running alongside the moving bus. The man heaved twice, caught his breath, smiled at the driver, and said, “Thank you so much. I guess tonight is my lucky night.” He smiled as he walked past me and took a seat in the middle of the empty rear bench seat. The bus rolled two blocks before it turned left and pulled to a stop with its big air brakes wheezing in front of the all-white East End Junior High School. The school had remained open after our arrival in the neighborhood. Within months, however, the school’s student body would be all black.
I got up to exit by the rear door and noticed the pleasant elderly man slumped on his seat with a narrow rivulet of blood negotiating a path from his left ear across the rise of his dark face and into his nose. “Driver! Something’s wrong with this man!” But by then I knew that the man, without having made a sound, was dead.
From that day on, whenever I thought of the dream my grandmother had described to me, I would think of the old man who had vanished from the realm of the living without whirl or whisper.
My grandmother seemed to believe that she had visited the dead that the old man had silently joined. Perhaps that was what she meant by souls traveling light.
We lived in a modest redbrick colonial at the edge of a wood on the last street in Church Hill. I did not have a house key. My mother was at home, as she almost always was. She did not work, or at least outside our home she did not work. This was not as she wished it, but my father was strongly opposed to the idea of her having a job outside our home.
“You’re late,” she said absently.
“I stopped by Grandma’s.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. Is Gordon home yet?”
“No, he had football practice but he should be along in a few minutes. Your father too. We’ll eat at seven.”
I went upstairs to my room, the smallest of the three small bedrooms in the house, and closed the door. From the top shelf in my closet, I took a battered tin tongue-lock strong box that my father had discarded to me as a toy when I was ten. I tore the three pages from my notebook on which I had written what my grandmother told me and inserted them along with the drawing she had made into a page-sized plastic sleeve. I placed the package in the strong box, locked it, and returned it to a place at the back of the highest closet shelf where it could not be seen from the floor by my mother, who, when no longer able to bear the room’s usual dishevelment, sometimes waded in to restore a semblance of order.
I sat on my bed and attempted to gather my thoughts about what I had learned. Unbidden, the names my grandmother had recited to me—Innekouzou and Ongnonlou—sounded in my head. I had never before heard an African name said aloud before my grandmother told me an hour ago that they had been her Dogon parents in the dream. Staring now at the dark brown skin on my arms, I wondered why. And why such had never before occurred to me. I’d heard around all sorts of foreign, even ancient, maybe antediluvian names without it occurring to me that I’d never heard any African names at all. Not one. Not a single one. I knew from school a Hezekiah who’d been named by his parents after the King of Judah. I even knew from my third period English class a Mordecai who’d been named for the Bible’s Mordecai who someone told me was a relative of Esther’s. A Moses played on the football team with Gordon. Just that morning in history class, our teacher Mr. Brown had taken up most of the hour telling us about Agamemnon and the Trojan War before allowing that both the king and his war may have been a myth. No one that I knew outside my family ever spoke about Africa without disparagement. That is, if they mentioned Africa at all.
I went downstairs and into the kitchen where I found my mother removing a casserole of baked lasagna from the oven. I started down the steps which led to a tiny utility room and the back door of the house.
“Where are you going, Virgil?”
My mother was the only person in the world who called me by my first name, Virgil. Everyone else called me by my middle name, Graylon.
“Outside for a minute to catch some air.”
“You just got home.”
“I know. I’ll only be a minute.”
“In the cold?”
I did not answer and opened the back door. My mother called after me, “You’re acting mighty strangely, son,”
but she was by then already distracted by what she was doing.
My mother kept a beautiful flower garden of rosebush beds and evergreen shrubs; perennials that had all but finished the stagger of their summer show; annuals that smiled colorfully from early spring bravely onward into the teeth of the oncoming frost. Verbenas, snapdragons, periwinkle, marigolds, daylilies, touch-me-nots, all showing their fading wares in well-weeded beds that wended this way and that full around the green central lawn of the large yard.
I walked to the center of the yard. There was little light from the house and a corner streetlamp to mitigate the yard’s inky darkness. I had come out without a coat. I shook myself to preempt shivering as I began to search the north sky.
The star was big and brilliant and easy to find. It stood well out from the thousands that shone in the black night sky, a luminous bluish globe hanging just above the horizon where the old Dogon priest in the dream had told my grandmother it would be.
I hugged myself against the cold and stared into the sky, searching the neighborhood of the big star for the little one that the priest had called Po Tolo. I found nothing. I looked again, hard and longer, but with the same result. I then surveyed the full stunning immensity of the shimmering blackness, as if I were looking upon the grand and mysterious beauty of the night sky for the first time. And with a point of reference. Strange, what a difference this alone made. Could it be that anything up there, near that shining light, could have something directly to do with us, me? Somehow I felt oddly, with the mere contemplation of such a question—what?—changed.
My grandmother used to say to me, “You’re my late bloomer. My spirit child. Your mother and father love you but they just don’t know who you are yet. You don’t either, I suppose, but you will soon enough. Just you wait.”
Gordon was the hope-star of my family. He was more handsome than I, more athletic than I, smarter than I. He was even pleasant and generous and social of temperament. That I was jealous of him seemed to demonstrate that he was, well, kinder than I as well. These were the facts. My father’s hopes revolved largely around Gordon, who was “going somewhere,” language no one used to measure my long-term prospects. My mother, for her part, was captured by the energy of my father’s pride in Gordon, the grand prize that my father, an ordinary insurance salesman, and my mother, an ordinary housewife, had won in nature’s lottery of small miracles. One hardly expects fortune of such magnitude to smile twice upon the same household. Indeed, I was loved. That, I never questioned. Otherwise, though, I was largely and benignly ignored.
All that said, as I remember it, I had not been an unhappy child, but rather one who ate, slept, and spun in a bubble of aimless spiritual and intellectual indifference. I hadn’t known what I would be, or was even supposed to be. I only knew that I was supposed to be something. Gordon would be a doctor. This seemed all but assured. This had been known to him for years and he was only eighteen. Gordon and my parents approached this as if a career in medicine were little different from a big-ticket item of merchandise toward which one simply planned for years and saved to obtain. They were solid north-south straightline flat-plane people. Unfortunately, I was not like them. I was a muddle of questions that wound around themselves. It wasn’t that I did not want to go somewhere. Indeed I did. But my somewhere required a measure of passion to reach, passion I could not generate before somewhere chose to reveal its elusive face to me.
When I look at Gordon, I guess I can understand why people would say that we favor one another, but most of the time I can’t see it at all. Perhaps this is because I know in every other way how very different we are. What I am about to say is not to disparage Gordon at all, or at least I earnestly think not, because I love him, but Gordon is not at all, from what I can see, a complicated person. He is very smart, but he labors under no psychological compulsion to dice every unimportant social issue into an incomprehensible hash. Thus, he appears to enjoy a working happiness, or a contentment of sorts at least, that he is not driven to deconstruct into a mess of gloom. He does not despond. I despond—and as instinctively as he does not. I do not enjoy being this way (or perhaps I do), but I cannot help it. I think that I mean this when I say it, but I do not wish to be like Gordon who appears to me happy but flat with an emotional surface that is all but impervious to abrasion. The hide of my psyche is rather more corrugated than his and registers even the most inconsequential of experiences that roll across it. For this reason, it is my guess that I know him better than he knows me. There is less of him to know. Or so it would seem.
Seeming, however, is deceptive. I can only know how Gordon seems. Not how he is. For I think that I may seem friendly and outgoing. In my heart I am. But the mechanics of engaging people make the entire proposition of doing so, for me, not worth pursuing. Most people who know me think that I am funny and social. I am anything but. I much prefer being alone, or with the very few for whom I feel uncalled to act or perform. When I am introduced to people, I invariably, seconds later, don’t remember their names because I never really listen for their names, so unnatural and false is the moving space between us. I don’t think this is the case with Gordon, or, at least, this doesn’t appear to be the case with Gordon who has no faculty for obsession of any kind. Thus, life for him seems easy, but I cannot know this because teenagers, even brothers, don’t talk about such things. Probably no one else does either.
My grandmother had always been something of an unspoken karmic ally to me. Only she seems to see inside my heart. My guess is that when I told her that afternoon that I wanted to be a writer, she knew that what I really meant was that I wanted, really wanted, to want to be a writer. Perhaps she believed that I had told her this merely to curry favor with her. But maybe I had only been hoping that destiny primed would provide me in my confusion some small glimpse of itself. Looking back on it, I think now with conviction that it was my grandmother’s uncanny knowing of me that inspired the timing of her revelations that day. Standing in the frigid dark gazing into the heavens that night, I felt for the first time in my life the sweet force of purpose.
A dark middle-aged four-door sedan rolled slowly to a halt, its headlights washing the yard. “Is that you out there, Gray?” The voice was loud and gritty in the cold night air, jarring me from my reverie.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You all right, boy?”
“I’m fine, Daddy,” I said and sighed involuntarily.
“Well, come on in the house,” my father said, sounding worried.
My father’s father and my grandmother married when they were fifteen, after she became pregnant with my father. Little more than children themselves, the two of them awaited the birth of their child while living in the house of my grandmother’s mother, an ill-tempered divorcée of high temperance and small charity who believed the crime the boy had committed against her daughter to be unpardonable in the sight of her very own vengeful God. The boy ran off, eventually, in adulthood, making a new life and family 150 miles away in Baltimore. Though he saw my father from time to time before he died of old age and regret in Baltimore, my father never forgave him for leaving his mother at the age of sixteen, months after he was born. My father was not a forgiving man, even during those early years. He had been an only child with no model of a man to copy and a blind mother who worked from dawn to dusk laundering clothes up on Monument Avenue. He had literally fabricated himself, which was to mean that Gordon and I would have no need to do the same. I did not understand this when I was growing up. All I could uncharitably see was a distant inflexible man who clanked about in a false girdle of out-rigging armor, while chiseling out immutable laws-for-living on tablets of certainty. With no margin of error to speak of, he had very much needed, so to speak, to keep his lines straight. Gordon intuitively understood this and my father, while I, less mature at the time, somehow childishly found attractive the poet’s weakness for philosophical dilemma and practical failure. But here I do myself too much credit. The fact is, though I did not know it at the time, I may have been too much like my father at least in one way, and as a consequence, took no pains, as Gordon had, to try and understand him.
We took our customary seats at the Formica-top kitchen table, and after a toneless recital of grace by my mother (grace that my father did not believe in, in any case), ate our lasagna in silence.