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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819573216 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
When the dream came I held my breath with my eyes closed I went insane, Like a smoke ring day When the wind blows Now I won't be back til later on If I do come back at all But you know me and I miss you now.
"On the Way Home," by Buffalo Springfield, was the first song I danced to drunk. It was 1969, I was fifteen. We'd have dance parties every weekend at St. John's Church, which was a block away from my high school. There was a local band that played there all the time, and they'd do covers of Buffalo Springfield. They'd also play Creedence Clearwater Revival stuff, and "Louie Louie" was a standard.
On this particular night, Thanksgiving weekend, I remember, there was an early snowstorm, and I was really, really drunk. I'd been drunk before but not this drunk. My friends and I would connive my older brother and his friends to buy us pints of Smirnoff's Lime Vodka. Begrudgingly, they would always do it, agreeing to the stupid and necessary truth of our passage. But this time before handing the pint over, my brother shook his head and said, "Y'all need to read James Baldwin." Who? "Baldwin, James Arthur Baldwin, who said, 'When I was growing up I had no writers, no artists — maybe a couple boxers.' Y'all need to think about that." What? Boxers? Chuckling, like little winter ducklings, how my friends and I sincerely and predictably responded. My brother also knew that Baldwin, whoever he was and whatever he represented, had no real meaning in this part of the passage.
I'd drink the whole pint, always, guzzling. One gulp. Then I would normally pass out. I'd finish the bottle and would get fifty yards from my house and pass out in the middle of our block's back alley. In the winter the landing was often soft but deadly; frostbite is no joke.
On this night I made it to the party. I was with two of my friends. Minneapolis is different now, but then there were five black people in the whole city. That's a joke, of course. Sort of. (In 1963 the Cincinnati, Ohio, Department of Agriculture transferred 32 black families from Cincinnati to Minneapolis. Before that transfer the entire population of black people in Minnesota was at 2 percent. My family began the black migration of Minneapolis. "We made the city black," my father likes to say.)
The party was a sanctuary for many of my white friends, two of my black friends, and me, dancing ... or stumbling around drunk to early Neil Young.
Though we rush ahead to save our time We are only what we feel And I love you, Can you feel it now.
And then Jeff Gunderson showed up. Jeff Gunderson was the city's best fighter — best white fighter. He would go to different parties in the different neighborhoods, neighborhoods of mostly white high schools. (The mostly black high schools were in a far different part of town, were mythological, were said to have governments and armies.) Gunderson would invade these parties to pick fights and kick the shit out of people. So he had a kind of tough-ass badge. And it was interesting because he was white, and he was really tough, fearless. Handsome, but he was missing teeth, a grinning absence that was part of his badge.
Obviously, my two friends and I were easy targets, walking into this party. So Gunderson sent his friend up to me, and his friend said, "Jeff has picked you guys to fight tonight." I was eighty-five pounds, ninety max. I was also teetering from side to side, while trying to comprehend his challenge. Jeff was a giant and his friend was a smaller giant, and I was drunk. The guy said, "I'll fight you, and Jeff wants to fight your big black friend over there." My big black friend was Grover. Grover could fight, but he was crazy. He didn't evaluate situations well, and this was not a good situation. "So talk it over with your friend, and I'll come back at the band's next break to set it up, cool," Gunderson's friend said and then walked away. So Grover wanted to do it, but I told him I thought it wasn't really a good idea. Grover, we're really drunk, I said. There's a snowstorm outside, and Jeff Gunderson has picked us to fight!
The band took a break, and Gunderson's friend came back and said, "So, what do you think? Let's do it; we'll do it outside, right behind the church. We'll give you guys five minutes." I took the five minutes and cornered Grover and my other friend and announced, I'm going home. So I left, snuck out a side door. I ran all the way home, about two miles, alone in a snowstorm, cold, terrified, stumbling, in a lot of fresh deepening snow that was also moving all around me, being blown about by all the wind.
The following Monday, in school, I went to the library and began reading James Baldwin. But only one book, the only one there, Go Tell It on the Mountain, half-way, and then stopped. (Told my friends I thought The Red Pony by Steinbeck was far more plausible).
Thanksgiving, Thirty-Four Years Later November 20, 2000 Dear R,
About Thanksgiving, I feel a little homesick ...
Also, I am a little sick that these grand people of America of great beliefs are giving thanks to God for all he has given during the year, only offer poor turkey. I tried, after reading your email to think of comparative African holidays. But I don't have to look at the entire Cote D'Ivoire for a like celebration. Right at my village, the village Ki-Yi, we had a celebration, December 19, where we stop to give thanks, pray, and present offerings of fruits and flowers and invite everyone to come share food, dance at this important occasion giving God thanks for all his blessing. Here, to stop and give thanks, the U.S. kills a turkey. Maybe I don't understand. Can you explain this to me?
Djédjé
November 22, 2000 Dear Djédjé,
I dunno, America, my home, is kind of an angry place. I just read about a tiny town in Utah, a town called Virgin, which enacted an ordinance requiring a gun and ammunition in every home, for self-defense. The mentally ill, convicted felons, conscientious objectors, and people who cannot afford to own a gun are exempt. Weird, right? And we talk a lot of trash in this country. Maybe we live here and are homesick too and don't know it. This is some of what I heard on a few of the streets near where I live just the other day:
"When I kill yo' ass, don't tell me you didn't push me!"
"Will you please shut the fuck up!"
"My bitch is like a cigarette."
"That's my son, damnit! I love that little shit. Hell, I was his father for the first two years of his life."
"Yes, baby, OK, OK. I did call you stupid, I admit it, but I didn't call you crazy. I swear."
"Yo girl! I didn't just show some attitude. I was bleeding."
And I heard this on TV just last week: "This music [jazz] don't have a damn thing to do with Africa."
— Art Blakey
Funny and sad, right? Bye R
One Hundred and Twenty Years Earlier (before life was funny and sad at the same time) November 1866
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Abundant forearms, bulging, folding below deep-hued satins, swelling at the seams. Pews filled with large, shining faces crowned in wide-brimmed hats of Easter colors but it's not Easter. Nodding, sweating eyes barely open and drifting. And dark, mostly blue dresses with small flowers and fake necklaces that glow. The singing is deafening, and when it subsides there is talking exultation like trumpets hugging their wide, wide necks. Thick soft smoke under the seats, or maybe clouds.
Hearing the euphoria from the Mt. Zion AME Methodist Church, lying in his half-filled tub, Billy Belk said, "Them niggers act like God is hard a' hearing." From the other room a gentle voice responded, "No, honey, them folks just love Jesus, that's all."
I don't ever remember hearing his name, Billy Belk — Papa's father, not Papa. Papa's name was Frank Lafayette Belk.
It was Papa who I remember, who I had seen. My grandaunt, Aunt Mattie, gave me his pocket watch when he died. A thin gold Elgin with a gold chain. It was later stolen from my apartment in New York (along with a black leather jacket, a blue shirt, a pair of white high-top three-stripes Adidas, some underwear, and a new pair of Levis; the thief, who must have been around my same size, left his own ragged and soiled clothes behind, along with a dank chemical smell that stayed in my apartment for a week). Papa was not white, but he would pass for white when it was necessary. Papa was a barber. And I remember watching one of his daughters washing his white and thinning hair with a bar of Ivory soap. Papa sat in a chair next to his kitchen sink wearing a white, starched shirt and suspenders. I never saw Papa cutting hair. He wore a Panama straw hat and had wire-rimmed glasses. All of his daughters looked white. Six of them. Two also wore glasses. Birda, my mother's mother, "Mama Bill," second to the oldest in her family, would also pass for white when it was convenient. "I'll let 'em serve a nigger and not know it," she would say to herself, smiling, while sitting at a Woolworth's lunch counter having a sandwich. And there were times she chose to be black. Like the time she was taking my mother to an all-black boarding school, Mather Academy, in Camden, South Carolina (It was a school run by the New England Southern Conference of the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. All white teachers, pretty much. There may have been two black teachers.) My mother, who was high-yellow, in Lancaster County skin-color terminology, was around thirteen or fourteen at the time. They were on a Greyhound Bus and were both sitting in the front, where Mama Bill chose to sit. The bus driver told my mother that she would have to move to the back of the bus, my mother being "a shade or two darker" than Mama Bill. Mama Bill told the bus driver that my mother was her daughter and that she would stay put. The bus driver told Mama Bill that she could go and sit in the back with my mother, but that my mother could not sit up front with her. Mama Bill told the bus driver to stop the bus "and let us off this damn Greyhound!!" The bus driver left them off in Kershaw, South Carolina. Fortunately, Papa's half-sister, Aunt Beatrice, lived in Kershaw, and she called them a cab and they went on to Camden, Mather Academy.
Birda was named after her mother, Birda Belk. Birda Belk was more white than Papa, a full-blood German, no black blood whatsoever. But Papa was white enough, would walk ahead of his daughters while walking down the main street of Lancaster, South Carolina, he being more white. There simply was not enough space on the same sidewalk, he'd say. Fifty years later my mother held my hand as we walked down that same sidewalk to the movie theater and up the stairs to the balcony, where five or six other black people were. I don't remember the movie. Papa was a Methodist and went to church down the road from his house. His wife, Birda Belk, was Catholic. She went to a Catholic church in Chester. Catholics weren't too accepted in the South in those days, so every Sunday she would to go to church a few miles away in the town where she grew up.
Billy Belk, Papa's father, was taking a bath at the end of the day. A tall, bony, dark man. The tub was small, his knees bent high and tight. And barely enough water to cover his genitals. She had just finished washing his back. Then he fell asleep. And when he woke up, he was blind.
"Mattie, I can't see no more," he said, naked and wet.
Had gone blind. That's the way the story has been passed down.
February 1999 Dear Anita,
I dreamed last night that I was dancing with Papa Satterwhite. It was the second time. He had a wide-legged step, low to the ground and rhythmic. I danced alongside him, and here's the strange part, I was invisible. Interesting, right? It got me thinking ... I need you to get some information for me, from Mom, about Papa's father, Mom's great-grandfather, the one who went blind.
1. What was his name?
2. Was he tall? I remember being told that he was tall.
3. Was he dark-skinned or light? Somehow I imagine him pitch black.
4. What was the name of his wife? What did she look like?
5. Finally, how did he actually become blind? If known.
I would appreciate as many answers as you can gather. Write them down exactly as Mom answers. Please.
Thanks.
Love R
Dear Ralph,
Papa's father was William (Billy) Belk, which is why they called Mama Bill, "Bill." As a little girl she used to lead him around when he was blind. She loved him tremendously. I called Aunt Mattie and she said that he was of average height, looked to be five-foot-eight to five-foot-nine. Kind of round but not fat. He was a quadroon (white father, mulatto mother). He had several wives, three to be exact (all of color). Papa's mother was wife number two. After she passed, Billy Belk married another light-skinned woman. How he became blind, she didn't know. She thinks he might have had glaucoma.
We have a picture of Papa's mother, Mattie Mcdowell Belk. Aunt Mattie was named after her. She said she has a picture of Billy Belk holding Papa when he was a baby. She's sending it to me today. The super-old picture Mom has of Papa when he was a young boy, he was posing with Billy Belk and his third wife, and Papa's half-sisters. AL
Mama Bill's name was Birda Belk Satterwhite. She was named after her mother, Papa's wife, Birda Belk. Her sister Mattie, named after Papa's mother, named her daughter Birda Rose. The Satterwhite name came from my grandfather, W.I. Satterwhite. Everyone called him by his first two initials, "W.I." William Isom, grandson of Isom Caleb Clinton (on his mother's side), a slave to a white lawyer named Ervin Clinton, who disobeyed South Carolina law by teaching the brightest of his slaves to read and write. Isom Caleb later became a bishop, and his brother, Frederick Albert, also born into slavery, became a state Republican senator of Lancaster County during Reconstruction. W.I.'s father, John William Satterwhite was a pharmacist. His father was Edward Satterwhite (a mulatto); mother, Lucinda Gary (mulatto). Edward's father was John Satterwhite (caucasian, a Revolutionary War officer and hero from Virginia).
I was five years old the first time I saw W.I. His large body was resting, folded in a metal washtub, bathing in his tiny kitchen. The same sparkling tub he would drink from on his porch on the weekends.
William Isom Satterwhite was tall and (red) black. A carved large-boned face. He was mostly bald, but bald like a magnified boy after a fresh haircut, not bald like a middle-aged man losing his hair. Road-map eyes, grinning with his large handsome body as though drinking were nothing more than an excited game of cards. W.I. sat on his porch with his youngest son, Trent, the two of them surrounding a metal washtub filled with orange juice, moonshine, and ice.
The day before, I sat on his lap on the same porch and eagerly watched him peel radishes. Fresh from his garden. He said that I would like them. I tried. They burned, I spit them out, and he nodded and smiled.
That summer of '57: climbing and then standing on a high horizontal branch, then pulling my pants down and peeing down through the labyrinth of green leaves and branches, aiming for an opening that gave way to a dusted splash down onto the red dirt road. "Country rain," that's what the older, larger boy had called it. That's how he demonstrated. But with such aplomb, climbing the tree, higher, so fast, and then making it rain like a deluge. His penis was the biggest thing I had ever seen, bigger than my father's. He also taught me how to smoke a cigar, in the same tree. Our backs propped up, resting, high up on the narrowing trunk. Sitting, legs long on lower branches. I got dizzy and fell, far down, with no aim. Soft bones bouncing in the colorful red dust.
On a much later summer eve W.I. was too drunk for the porch, his son, and family, and ran through the woods because he believed that if he didn't run the big bright-colored animals chasing him would trample his body and eat his flesh. After that incident my mother never saw him alive again.
"Mama would send us away on the weekends because he only got drunk on the weekends. She didn't want us to see him drunk, not the way he got drunk. During the rest of the week he was a good father. Would kill a white man if he had to, if his family was threatened. Fearless. W.I. played trumpet, in a troubadour band, the Lancaster Midnight Serenaders. They would practice in the front yard. The thirties, forties. He knew W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois would come to the house to talk to W.I. It was the beginnings of the NAACP. W.I. was a very smart man. Generous to a fault. Owned a lot of land but would get drunk and gradually signed it all away to his friends. My poor daddy."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Come home Charley Patton"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Ralph Lemon.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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What People are Saying About This
“Come home Charley Patton floats between memoir and dream, history and fable, family and fantasy. Generous, informative, personal and shrewd, this is a compelling self-portrait of Lemon’s art and life, love and grief. Drawings, poems, maps, lyrics, and stories are all choreographed here to stage Lemon’s intoxicating life-dance.”
“Critically-acclaimed choreographer and dancer Ralph Lemon’s new book is a memoir, an experimental art installation, and a rigorous critical study that resonates with power and showcases his gifts as a storyteller and cultural critic. Come home Charley Patton is a poignant and imaginative work that contributes to the growing field of scholarship on African American travel and critical journeys linked to excavating the political and socio-historical past. It is at once mysterious, enigmatic, and provocative.”