The damp, cold morning air tore about the square in blustery fits. I pulled the hood of my unlined nylon rain shell over my head and hunched against the blade of the wind. The two cement walkways that crossed at the center of the campus quad were laden with the traffic of students making their way to early-morning classes. Voices caught and died in the sharp gusts. Head bent low, I felt very much a stranger negotiating a forest of communing shadows. I set as swift a pace as I could and made it to the library without noticing a face that I recognized.
I had chosen the Harlem Renaissance poets to study and write about chiefly because they were black writers of a bygone era whose work was profoundly artistic, softshelled, and emotionally comprehensible to me. Indeed, they wrote with lamentation and sorrow, with rage and protestation, but, always and ever, well, their exposed and infectious humanity the proof of it. In a sad, glorious time before the broad American celebration and commercialization of crudity hatched itself upon the tender arts, these were writers, first and foremost, whose verse declined quietly the full surrender of poignance to anger, craft to politics, and taste to coarseness.
Or so I saw what may simply have been just another refuge of mine in which to hide from remembering.
I was working on the appendices and notes to my thesis paper. Langston Hughes, the best known of the Harlem Renaissance poets, was far and away the most prolific of them, and thereby claimed the largest section of my annotated references. The New York–born Countee Cullen, who died in 1946 at the age of forty-three, however, was my critical preference.
I stretched out a yawn and reared against the back of my chair which was sandwiched between metal racks of books on the fifth floor of the library’s stacks. I lolled my head and raised it in an arc to stare blankly into the industrial ceiling while remembering the lines of Cullen’s “Heritage.”
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
I smiled and reprised the exchange.
Eden, cradle of creation. Bordered by the Gihon River of Ethiopia. Genesis 2:13.
I’m impressed.
I’m impressed. I’m impressed. I’m impressed.
She had said this—and smiled. I hadn’t felt so good in a long, long while.
I liked being alone in the stacks. Most of Morgan State’s library users did their work in the main reading room, but I much preferred working at the little desk jammed against the wall cheek-by-jowl to books that spoke only when called upon. I had never particularly liked being alone before.
Geraldine Trice was a blurry character from that more normal, but now distant past life. As were my parents.
From that time before, only my grandmother crossed over into the unsettled space of my open daily thoughts. And Gordon, who was relentlessly present.
Two books on black poetry rested on the little desk. I pushed them flush to the upper corners and checked the alignment with the palm of my hand, swiping it along the edge of the desk. I placed my ruled spiral notebook on the desk in the center, taking care to leave it parallel with the sides of the desk top. I then put two ballpoint pens and a sharpened pencil on the desk to the left of the notebook, lined them up, and spaced them equidistant from each other. I checked the arrangement of the items carefully and found it satisfactory. I did not know why, but I had developed in recent years a need to impose order upon the small objects with which I did my work. I needed to know where everything was, not only my research materials, my drafts, notes, monographs, books, and the like, but also my stapler, my paperclips, rubber bands, and three-hole punch. It seemed to me that I took excessive care of these inconsequential possessions and I did not know why, because I had had no early or natural penchant for neatness.
I was an obsessive believer in the usefulness of list making. In adolescence, I had been disorganized and irresponsible, but, perhaps as a consequence, largely happy. Since then, I had imposed upon myself the discipline that was not installed earlier. This was much like the body discovering the need of a skeleton after it had been fully formed, and then resorting to wearing the mislaid bones on the outside of the body’s surface as a flexless cage. This made for considerable adult pain and smaller happiness, but in the last analysis, success, even though late-onset discipline was artificial and manifested itself in the obsessive making of, among other things, lists.
I wanted to be a writer. Why was that? Was I an artist, born to express, to create? Hardly. Had I then some perverse need to exert complete control over the tiniest of available disorders, over some little unit of something, at least: my notebooks, my pens, my pencil, my books, my excuses, my ineffectual explanations? Lists, for God’s sake.
Before it happened, I had told Daddy that I wanted to be a writer. This was after I had told Grandma. My father said that no one knew any black—no, what he said was “colored”—writers except the people who wrote for the Afro-American and did not get paid anything to speak of. “Or somebody like that communist Richard Wright, who ran off to France with a white woman, or somebody like James Baldwin who is a homosexual. Who’ve you ever known who was colored, Gray, that was normal like everyday people who made a living from writing?” I couldn’t answer this, and he gave me one of his so there looks. Had he heard of Zora Neale Hurston, who died penniless, he’d have thrown her in there too.
We knew a lot of black doctors. I don’t know how many there were, but enough to see after the more than 100,000 black people who lived in Richmond. And practically all of these black doctors were rich, even Dr. Grimes, the speculum butcher who’d killed Heidi Parker, a sixteen-year-old schoolmate, and left more than a few others barren for life.
Gordon was going to be a doctor. He was going to do something that not only made a lot of sense, but made a lot of money. And I was going to be a writer. “That’s crazy, boy, just plain crazy. When will you ever pull your head out of the clouds?”
I had put it in my graduation class yearbook anyhow.
Although I had long ago lost track of the book, I knew the notation was there beneath my cap-and-gown picture in the 1963 Rabza: Graylon March; Course, college preparatory; Activities, English club, drama club; Ambition, writer.
I had been the only aspiring writer in my class, or in the whole high school, for that matter, if my science teacher, Mr. Garver, had it right. Certainly we’d heard of the famous black writers, but not one of our English teachers had required us to read anything that any of them had written.
For whatever the reason, I began as early as the eleventh grade to read their work on my own. I liked Richard Wright and identified strongly with his angry Bigger Thomas. I did not like Zora Neale Hurston, finding her Negro-dialect characters drawn more for the liking of white readers than black readers. I had been reassured to read that Richard Wright felt much the same way that I did about her. He was to write of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God: “In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”
For many of the same reasons I disliked Paul Laurence Dunbar while the white folks praised him as they had the fawning Phillis Wheatley. I had been impatient with Charles W. Chesnutt and gave up on him, perhaps much too early. I thought that James Baldwin, the only living black writer I’d had a chance to read, was, with his broadly encompassing race perspectives, the most relevant of all of them to black folks’ contemporary struggles.
I kept all of this to myself, however: whom I read, what I read, and what I thought about what I read. I did not share this with Mama and Daddy, who would both likely have been pleased that I was reading so much. I wanted to keep this for myself, an interest that I owned away from them, an incubating intellectual curiosity that I guarded as jealously as I did the Dogon dream notes in the plastic sleeve in the tin box at the back of the top shelf of my closet.
I read books I didn’t even tell my grandmother about. I did not want to hear anyone tell me that they were happy I had found an “interest.” I was having a one-way discussion with great black thinkers about matters more compelling than quantities and units, meters and measures, prospects and platitudes. I read on in small fear that I would be discovered by a caring person and subjected to a practical comment or a practical look or a practical anything. I had decided that I wanted to be a writer, the least practical career goal of any I had heard about. To have any chance at all of succeeding, I had to learn to think—that is, to think critically, to see from an imaginary space above, in one single sweep of vision, past and future, from the low, welltaught, mean ignorance of the present, in order to arrive at a voice that was mine, all mine, uncompromising to fools and concert-goers. Except for Grandma, who’d taught me to “look beyond the fence,” I felt completely alone.
Footfalls resounded through the dark narrow cement halls of the stacks, growing louder with the sharp, short strike of a woman’s heel. I turned from the wall to watch a tall, slender young woman I guessed to be eighteen or so approaching with two books under her arm. She wore a green dress and pumps that matched. Her hair was long and doctored to a brilliant sheen. Her makeup had been carefully applied over a tad-too-heavy base coat.
She said, “Hi.” Pleasant. Not pretty. Cute. Taking the effect of this for granted.
I said, “Good morning.”
“Are you Graylon March?”
“Yes.” A little impatient, but curious.
“You left a reference material slip in the box downstairs.”
“Oh, yes I did.” Remembering that indeed I had done so.
“We found two books for you.” She handed them to me.
“Thank you.”
She smiled but made no move to leave. I waited.
“It says on the slip that you are a candidate for a master’s degree in English.”
“Yes, I am.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what could books on dreams and reincarnation have to do with English?”
I expelled a small sibilant breath through my teeth, evidencing involuntarily that the question had annoyed me.
The smile fell. She turned and left, the click of her heels coming faster as she retreated down the long hall toward the service elevator. I sighed, disappointed with myself. The girl had merely tried to be friendly.
I looked at the books for a while without opening them, as if I were reluctant to be presented with discouraging news. The first book was entitled, Dreams and Their Meaning, and had been written by a Robert Melroy. The volume had a self-published font and feel to it. I read a few lines from the introduction, judged the writing unscholarly, and laid the book aside. The second book, Reincarnation: Case Studies, had been written by a Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright, a psychology professor on the faculty at the University of Southern California. The book had been published in 1964 by the Golden State University Press. The jacket notes featured three-line encomiums from Harry Grossman, a famous research psychologist, and five other professors from highly respected schools, including Dr. Broadus Benjamin, a pioneer in the field of paranormal phenomena.
I read first the table of contents and then leafed desultorily through the book, scanning a section here and there without much of a plan.
In the introduction, Dr. Harris-Fulbright gave a definition of reincarnation (the transmigration of a soul from a dying body to a living body) and listed religions and prominent people who either embraced reincarnation as a tenet of pietistic faith or as a simple nonreligious personal belief.
Among those who embraced a belief in reincarnation through their religions were the Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs of India, the Theravada Buddhists of Burma, the Theravada Buddhists of Thailand, the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, the Igbo of Nigeria, the Haida and Tlingit of Alaska, the Alevis of Turkey, the Druze of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, the Buddhists of Tibet. It seemed a simpler and less taxing matter to list the world religions that did not embrace reincarnation (Christianity and Islam) than to delineate the much larger list of religions and cultures that did, a preponderance of faiths that may have prompted the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to remark that, “The best definition of Europe is that it is the part of the world that does not believe in reincarnation.” But even in England, a Sunday Telegraph poll had shown that 28 percent of British adults believed in reincarnation, putting them on a believers list that included Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, General George Patton, Virgil, Plato, and the ancient Egyptians who believed in reincarnation long before the establishment of Buddhism and Hinduism.
I weighed for a while what I had read. I tried, as always, without succeeding, to understand how people were able to girdle themselves with “beliefs” which were based upon little more than “faith” which was based circularly upon “beliefs” unsupported by any compelling remembered personal experience. Having never experienced either, try as I might, I was not able to understand how one could manage to believe in heaven or hell, either, as an eventual destination, or as an unending postlife condition. Thus, while I did not believe in reincarnation, with equal conviction I did not not believe in reincarnation. And I was not, in the least, uncomfortable about not knowing things that were inherently unknowable. Nor would I have believed the stories of people who were said to have testified to having remembered past lives any more than I believed that Oral Roberts was really healing people on television in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But I believed my grandmother.
What’s more, I knew that she had described to me things she could not have learned or known about within the very real mortal small realm of her life as a blind hand laundress living on Duvall Street in Richmond, Virginia.
She knew things about the heavens well before the scientific community even suspected them. She also knew things that even now cannot be conventionally explained. She knew that the Dogon people (of whom she had never heard) knew for at least 600 years about the orbit path of an unseeable star, and the general behavior of the stars and planets of the stellar world. How could the Dogon have known these things? How could my grandmother have known about the Dogon, or what they had known about for so long before everybody else?
My grandmother believed that she learned this from her Dogon father in a life that she was living in Mali in the year 1394, 149 years before the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus hypothesized in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium that the earth revolved around the sun.
The jacket notes said that Dr. Harris-Fulbright had investigated (presumably through the use of face-to-face interviews and story-matching historical research) more than 1,000 claims of remembered past lives, some of which were recalled via hypnotic regression and others that were remembered in dreams. The bulk of the book was devoted to case studies of claims investigated by her and others.
One such case, for instance, was the story of Laurel Dilmen (pseudonym) who was born in Chicago during the Depression years. Under hypnosis, Dilmen claimed to remember several past lives, one of which was the life of Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado who was born November 15, 1555 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The daughter of a Spanish officer and a German mother, Antonia’s travels took her from Hispaniola to Germany, from Germany to England, from England to Spain during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
While most hypnotic regressions produce recollections of a nebulous quality, the story Antonia (Dilmen) told to her hypnotist, Dr. Linda Tarazi, in thirty-six sessions over a two-year period was replete with the names, venues, events, and dates of the most obscure small-town transpirations. For example, Antonia (Dilmen) said that from 1584 to 1588 there were two, not the usual three, inquisitors for the town of Cuenca where she lived. She went on to name the two. When Dr. Tarazi headed to Cuenca to check this in the town’s Episcopal archives, she discovered that Antonia (Dilmen) had been right, as was the case with every other trivial particular she had described, some of which were confirmable only from rare books in specialized Spanish libraries.
Dr. Harris-Fulbright concluded that Antonia’s (Dilmen’s) story was entirely too complex and detailed for her to have fashioned it out of whole cloth. In any case, why would she have done such, even had she the time, which did not appear to be the case? Dilmen was not seeking to sell her story, nor was she seeking publicity. Dr. Tarazi, who’d spent years verifying Antonia’s (Dilmen’s) story, in time came to believe it, and so in turn did Dr. Harris-Fulbright who presented the case in her book along with ten others she thought stood up under rigorous investigation.
I spent an hour taking down notes about the past life claims described in the book. I decided that I would try to reach Dr. Harris-Fulbright, either through her publisher or by telephone. The library kept in the reference section of the reading room a telephone directory for every major American city. I looked in the Los Angeles directory and found a listing for a Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright on Mulholland Drive.