Mar 012013
 

Laura K Warrell

In this powerful and important essay, Laura K. Warrell refuses to bow to Quentin Tarantino as a pop icon and instead calls him out as a puerile manipulator of stereotypes. She puts his brutal and salacious Mandingo fight scene in Django Unchained (winner of the completely undeserved Oscar for Original Screenplay) up against Ralph Ellison’s horrific fight scene in Invisible Man (published separately as a short story called “Battle Royal”) and a recent theatrical production of the novel at the Huntington Theater in Boston. All three portray forced fight scenes between black men as an expression of white racism in the American South; they give Warrell an amazing opportunity to contrast approaches, values, techniques and motives and to deliver a stinging indictment of lingering racism and black stereotyping in Hollywood and PC America. In the end, Ellison is the voice that speaks the black experience with grace, intelligence and dignity.

dg

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Perhaps it was a strange twist of literary fate that a dramatic production of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man opened at the Huntington Theater in Boston ten days after Quentin Tarantino’s slave revenge fantasy Django Unchained debuted in cinemas across the nation. Two days after seeing the play, I read Ellison’s short story “Battle Royal,” and the weekend after that I went to see Tarantino’s film. Each work portrays, as a center-piece, a fight scene between black men with white men as an audience; such a convergence was too intriguing not to explore.

Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952, is considered one of the finest novels of American literature and a groundbreaking interpretation of the black American experience.  The novel is about a young black man’s struggle to define himself against the backdrop of early twentieth century American racism.  The story “Battle Royal,” which Ellison published separately in 1948, is the first chapter of the novel.  In the story the young narrator is invited to read a speech he has written on social progress to an audience of white men who force him to participate in a boxing match with his peers before he can deliver his speech.  The play, adapted by producer Oren Jacoby and directed by Christopher McElroen, was first staged at the Court Theatre in Chicago in 2012 and ran at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston from January 4 to February 3, 2013.

via WBUR, Boston

The first thing I noticed about the staging of the fight in the theater production was how horrifying and heartbreaking it was.  The bare-chested black actors seemed incapacitated by fright; their fear made them appear child-like as they swung their arms and stumbled, blindfolded, around the stage.  At the time, I found it simply heartbreaking, but in retrospect wondered if it was somewhat manipulative on the part of the director to make these men appear so completely debilitated by their victimization.  It reminded me of the way I sometimes feel watching certain movies by Steven Spielberg, as if the director simply wants to tug at our heartstrings without asking us to think much about what is happening.  Any integrity, grit or sophistication these men might have had before entering the boxing ring seemed to have been wiped out in in order to present them as defenseless and scared.  It seems insulting and just plain inaccurate to suggest that grown men are not still grown men even when they are scared senseless.  Additionally, to infantilize them in a sense robs them of the same dignity the play’s white characters take from them.  However, these personality traits – utter purity and childlike innocence – are personality traits “good” black characters commonly possess in popular culture.  It is as if in America, we can only handle discussions about oppression and violence when the victims are angels and the aggressors are complete assholes.  Consider how some people’s sympathies change when a rape victim turns out to have a sordid sexual past or how the Trayvon Martin case “took a turn,” at least in public perception, when the boy’s alleged Facebook page was discovered showing him wearing sagging pants and flipping off the camera.

In Ellison’s story, a white woman is brought out before the fight to dance provocatively for the enjoyment of the white male spectators.  In the stage play, this woman’s sole emotion seemed to be fear as well.  The actress playing her danced around pitifully, looking as if she were about to start weeping.  All the while, the white characters, played by two white actors and a handful of black cast members wearing emotionless, quite frightening white masks, acted like our worst nightmares of what sexist racists can be.  So maybe this was the problem with the stage version of the battle royal; the actors were asked to play one note.

Admittedly, I did not come to this conclusion until I returned to Ellison’s text days after the performance (before then, I pitied the black men and white woman, and was disgusted by the white men, as, without doubt, was the entire audience).  But in Ellison’s text so much more is happening.  For one, the author injected a significant amount of sexual tension into the scene.  One of the other black fighters even has an erection.  Ellison also showed us the range of reactions the main character experiences internally; even while he gets pummeled he is thinking about his speech and his dignity, telling us how he feels about the other men, plotting ways to achieve his ultimate goal and negotiating with the other fighters.  Most importantly, his future self is interpreting events.  Then there is the tangle of responses the main character has to the white woman’s dancing – desire, revulsion, empathy.  He wants to protect her, to kill her and have sex with her.

In fact, even the white woman seemed more complex in Ellison’s text than she did on stage.  At first, I sensed apathy in her as I read the story, as if she were mechanically going through the motions of seduction.  It was only after the white men started aggressing her that I sensed her fear.  And what about the other black man in the fight the narrator tries to negotiate with – suggesting they fake a knockout to end the spectacle – but who will not take the deal?  His presence in the story added a whole other layer to events, which his absence on stage negated.

So what was missing on stage, for this scene at least, was the nuance and complexity the short story gives us through narration.  The same nuance and complexity that is required of any in depth, smart examination of race and culture, and which is often lacking even in the most elite intellectual circles.  Sure, we could say, ‘well, this was a stage production, there’s no way to convey the same depth.’  However, most of the play was presented with extensive monologues and asides; the lead actor would take center stage and explain his character’s thoughts and reactions to the events of the play by reciting lengthy passages from the novel verbatim (which Ellison’s estate apparently required of the playwright when asked to turn the book into a play).  So, in some ways, the fight scene was one of the only scenes where there was really no narration.  What was happening internally for the character was never presented to the audience; we simply witnessed the fight scene, and thus, only understood one dimension of its significance.

The notion that oppressed characters are sometimes turned into flawless, defenseless figures to gain empathy, is related to the fear many Americans experience of being labeled culturally insensitive, politically incorrect, or worse, racist. It is easier to depict an oppressive incident and its perpetrators as thoroughly bad and awful, and shave off any edges and contradictions in the victims’ characters, so as not to leave any room to interpret events otherwise.  But it is this flatness, the inability to hold two or more potentially contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time, the notion that things are either categorically good or bad, that is what I find frustrating in many conversations about race, culture and gender in American society.

Does such a controlled rendition of the fight scene in the play protect both the play’s producers and its audience from being un-PC?  Would showing any of the narrator’s unattractive traits or impulses confuse our allegiances?  Do such controlled interpretations also protect us from having to look too deeply at the very things we fear most, for instance, that black men might desire white women (a fact that has a tendency to set off explosions in both communities)?  Then there are other realities we do not really want to face, like that decent, upstanding citizens might also be racist, that violence might sometimes be arousing, that even victims of oppression can have unappealing compulsions.  When we fail to embrace the complexity of these issues, we risk not coming to a true or lingering understanding of them.

 In staging the fight this way, the director also contributes to, rather than underscores, the dehumanization and objectification of the black male and white female characters by turning them into mere symbols of oppression instead of full-fledged human beings with complex identities living in a complex world.  Even worse, such flatness goes against Ellison’s original intentions for the piece.  He included the narration in “Battle Royal” and all of Invisible Man for a reason.  Consider the following, which is from Ellison’s introduction to the novel.  As Ellison was putting the work together, he wondered, “why most protagonists of Afro-American fiction (not to mention the black characters in fiction written by whites) were without intellectual depth.  Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, subject to the most extreme forms of the human predicament but yet seldom able to articulate the issues which tortured them.”  Even if these kinds of characters did not exist, Ellison felt it was “necessary, both in the interest of fictional expressiveness and as examples of human possibility, to invent them.”  His goal, in part, was to “create a narrator who could think as well as act” and to “reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal.”  It is the characters’ intelligence, depth and complexity, as well as the complexity of the fight itself, which are revealed in the narration.  By eliminating this part of the narration, the stage production reduces the characters to empty, even stereotyped figures used to demonstrate a social struggle.  The characters in the onstage battle royal were presented as subjects of history rather than real people able to contemplate their individual fates.

Let us turn to Django Unchained and the so-called Mandingo fight scene, in which a slave owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio lustfully watches two black slaves beat each other.  It should be noted that after the film was released, a legion of historians came forward to prove that many of the films most horrific scenes would never have occurred historically, including these fights.  Still, the point, if there was one, of staging such a scene must have been to show how shitty slave owners were, stripping black men of their dignity by turning them into beasts fighting for their own perverse pleasure.

As opposed to the stage production of Invisible Man, where we have the context of the rest of the play to attach some sense of humanity and personhood to the boxing men, the fighters in Django have no personhood at all.  They are simply growling, bloody animals.  Tarantino seems to have a fascination with white men sexually violating black men, considering the anal rape of Marsellus Wallace by a white man in Pulp Fiction, the homoerotic master-and-slave relationship between the DiCaprio and Samuel Jackson characters in Django, not to mention the marble statue of two naked wrestlers entwined that stood prominently behind the DiCaprio character’s seat during dinner.  Perhaps such references are just Tarantino’s way of attacking men he finds loathsome by calling them gay, which would not be too far-fetched considering how juvenile he can be.

It is worth considering where Tarantino “places” his audience as compared to the two other productions.  In the stage production, the audience is sitting in a theater so does not have a camera directing them to watch one thing or another.  They are more like spectators of the fight itself.  Still, they are clearly watching the events of the play, and the fight, through the eyes of the main character who has been their guide since the play’s beginning.  Ellison’s story is told in a close, first person narrative so, as in the play, the audience sees the fight through the narrator’s eyes.  But in Django, the audience sees the black fighters mostly through the white slave owner’s point-of-view, thus, they watch the fight through his objectifying gaze.

Through this gaze, Tarantino turned the two fighting men into sex objects; the violence, as in much of his work, adding to what seems to be his own sense of eroticism as these half-naked men slithered all over each other on the floor, covered in blood instead of sweat.  We hear bones cracking, skin splitting and blood splattering, along with some agonized screams.  But these men say and think nothing and no one says or thinks anything about them, except for DiCaprio’s horny moaning and encouragement to keep fighting.  Of course, we also get to see the Django character and his white friend seethe every so often as they watch the fight as if to remind us that this is in fact terrible.  But by not allowing these men to have voices, let alone identities, Tarantino has done to them what he apparently loathes the slave owners for doing; turning them into objects for an audience’s enjoyment, the audience being those of us sitting in the theater.  In some ways it feels we as audience members are complicit in Tarantino’s efforts to dehumanize these men, inadvertent as these efforts might be.

 In the movie, I would wager to guess that these men were portrayed as over-sexualized, disempowered victims devoid of complexity or humanity not because of any desire to provoke sympathy or be politically correct, but because they were created and directed by Quentin Tarantino, who, for all his talents, seems to have lost the intellectual ability to see nuance and complexity at all, let alone the nuances and complexities of race in America.  Pulp Fiction and some of his earlier films handled such material better.  No doubt, part of the movie’s appeal, like so much in the culture, is its ability to arouse our basest, most animalistic instincts; the erotic charge American audiences seem to get from naked (literally) aggression, blood and violence.

While the play takes an intellectually remote stance to its fight, Tarantino’s movie takes an emotionally and intellectually desensitized stance, which fits our tragically desensitized culture.  Both offer simplistic representations of the racial struggles their fights present, though I would never place the play, which in other ways was revelatory, in the same category as Tarantino’s movie.  Only the fight in Ellison’s story is complex and layered, which is fascinating, considering how long ago, and at what point in the nation’s history, it was published.  This must speak either to the gradual decline of both high and low culture in this country, especially when it comes to conversations about thorny issues, or the innate structure of fiction which allows for greater nuance.  Of course, it could also be both.

The artistic consequences of such simplistic portrayals are as important as the cultural consequences.  Without the nuance, audiences do not get to enjoy the layers, complexities and surprises multi-dimensional characters and fictional situations offer.  Such portrayals stifle fruitful discussion and progress.  They also make for intellectually offensive, half-assed or just plain boring entertainment.

—Laura K. Warrell

References

Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz. The Weinstein Company, 2012. Film.

Invisible Man.  By Ralph Ellison.  Dir. Christopher McElroen.  The Huntington Theatre Company, Boston.  2 February 2013.  Performance.

Ellison, Ralph.  Invisible Man.  New York: Vintage Books, 1990.  15-33.  Print.

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Laura K. Warrell lives in Boston where she works as a writing teacher and tutor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Northeastern University.

 

 

 

Jan 012013
 

  Me at the age 4, having just finished a violin lesson. Circa 1985.

New Year’s Day, the beginning of  Numéro Cinq‘s fourth year of publication — we have a lovely example of a set essay, a beautiful, poignant, shocking evocation of a Manhattan childhood from Tiara Winter-Schorr. NC publishes three set essays: Childhood, What It’s Like Living Here and My First Job. And by set essay, I mean an essay written to our guidelines, not exactly free form (though, of course, in the hands of a terrific writer the set essay always departs in imaginative ways from its guideline roots). We have had some wonderful results from this project. See the slider at the top of the page for more stellar examples of the Childhood series. And don’t forget that Melissa Fisher’s “My First Job” won the $1,000 3 Quark’s Daily Arts & Literature Prize in 2012. After you read Tiara’s latest contribution, take the time to browse the set essay archives and see what our contributors have accomplished.

dg

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Prologue: Exile in the City

My story begins when my grandfather slaps my pregnant 19-year-old mother to the ground in the backyard of his house on Smith Street in Glens Falls, NY. She is carrying my brother and engaged to a black man she met at college. My grandfather is a decorated World War II soldier who weds himself to German pride and American patriotism. He knocks my mother back into the muddy spring earth when she reminds him that her own mother is Filipina and his marriage is interracial. My grandmother sits on a swing, silent but crying. The child doesn’t deserve to live, he says. Get out, he says.

Days later she is in New York City, noticing that the sky here is never a uniform shade of black but rather a deep red shot through by light from yellow street lamps. She moves through the whole city in a span of nearly 40 years. My brother and I are both born in different corners of the city, but he dies in Glens Falls near Smith Street, on his first visit home, the first time the family has tried to remember itself since his birth. Almost a decade has passed. A day comes during this reunion when he is biking down a dead-end street with our cousins and is killed by a man named Ralph Midgette who is drunk behind the wheel of his vehicle. My grandfather uses his army training to run a heart pump, trying to keep my brother alive. My brother dies three days later. At Ralph’s trial, my mother asks the court for leniency because his wife will be left alone to support five children. The court grants her request.

My mother returns to the city under a red night sky to begin another period of exile, one of grief and searching. Four years later, I am a clump of cells stuck to her insides and her search is ended. She waits for me and walks through Times Square on nights when I do not stop kicking. She teaches me the city streets by the rhythm of her muffled footsteps.

 

Love

I am born during an autumn storm, the kind that is composed of continuous rumbling thunder and spurts of lightening. My mother’s water breaks in bed and I am born in a flash, in less than an hour. I sleep in a bassinet next to her hospital bed instead of in the nursery down the hall with other babies. She lives only for her children but she is also an art teacher, a photographer, a runner, and a reluctant wife. My father is an art professor, a painter, a writer, and an asthmatic.

Love is always fresh between them, the kind of freshness that makes a tone of voice warm even in the coldest of times. Over the years, they pass me artifacts of their love: a gemstone belt buckle from my mother, a silver ring with the sign of Christ from my father, stacks of photographs that also seem to be memories.

My parents — Justin Schorr and Sharon Winter (holding me as a one-year-old) — 1982

Is he your real father?

People ask this rudely before I am old enough to understand. Yes, he is real from the time I am born, mopping his paint-splattered floor 17 times before my mother arrives home with me.  He puts his name on me and my birth certificate so he will never be reduced to a step-father.  At night he sings to me in a flat voice that is all gravel and we dance across the living room until I rub my eyes into his neck, fighting sleep. He has a sharp smell that hangs around him, a mix of turpentine for his work and peppermint candies for his indigestion.  His canvasses cover the white walls, mazes of color, gobs of paint like gems and smears of nameless shades.

My mother straps me to her chest and we move from the darkroom to the bedroom to the kitchen, where steam from the pots and pans make me sweat. I remember straining my neck to watch her hands develop film in one room or chop vegetables in another. Eventually, always listening, she turns me facing outward so I can watch. I am probably a year old by now. I become fascinated with watching by the time I am two. She gives me my first camera, a black plastic Olympus with a sliding lens door, when I am two and a half. I take pictures of her from the ground up, so she is enormous like a towering religious statue.

Home is 106 Morningside Drive, a building sitting at the top of a long hill which rises above Harlem. Apartment 83 is half art studio, half home. The hallway is an endless passage that leads into a jungle. The jungle is actually a double living room with an archway that is entirely obscured by plants. Six-foot trees lean into wandering Jews that snake down into the wide leaves of a dumbcane. Then there is a green creature with leaves like giant four-leaf clovers that can cover me entirely when I am two. A palm tree bends against the ceiling, entangled with a wall of green leaves and reaching plants. The wall of deep and light green leaves separate the double living room and takes a space large enough that I can disappear in the greenery.

I learn to run like my mother. I use her white cowboy boots and round sunglasses to do it. The boots are stiff, too stiff to let my knees bend but I run anyway and I keep running the passage until I fall. I do it again. The hallway is also lined with my father’s paintings, gargantuan squares of pastel color and splashes of white and black. They are secure, like him, stuck down solidly and easy to use as a way to steady myself during a burst of running. My mother stands at the end of the hall every day, ready to help me put the boots back on or carry me away after a bad fall.

I do not hear my parents argue until I am at least ten years old, but my father moves out when I am three and does not return home until he is nearing the end of his life.

 

Wonderland

My mother and I walk relentlessly because we both have jumpy, energetic legs accustomed to sprinting. We start at Mondel’s Chocolates. The darkness under the awning is always deceptive, a bit scary but also enticing because of the window overstuffed with all three kinds of chocolates, the milky kind that slides easily to the back of my throat, the dark kind that puckers my mouth as if it is lemon, and the silky white kind that is too sweet and smells like vanilla. Rows of these multi-colored candies rise above my head so far that I can tilt my head back until I am dizzy and still see more rows of raspberry-drizzled chocolates and truffles decorated with tiny red flowers made of sugar frosting. To one side are the stacks of chocolate and to my other side is a tower of stuffed animals like jungle animals tied to a skyscraper. Gorillas at the top and tigers at the bottom are large enough to almost frighten me, but the smell of melting dark chocolate that hangs persistently is a constant reminder that this place traffics in magic and wonder. Kaleidoscopes hang at different angles from the ceiling, the paper kind that shoots simple patterns of color toward your eye and the glass kind with crystal that spins out the most intricate patterns your childish eye can detect. The world fragments into a million pieces and comes together again in shifting sequences of light and color. Look into a kaleidoscope and you are down the rabbit hole, the smell of liquid chocolate in your nose and the constantly shifting patterns of light and dark, candies and tigers and odd flashes of colored glass that tumble toward your eye like gemstones.

"Wonderland"                  Mondel's Homemade Chocolates, NYC 1985Mondel’s Homemade Chocolates, NYC 1985

Kevin is a homeless man who haunts the streets between Morningside Drive and the lower sections of Broadway around Columbia University. He sings. I am holding my mother’s hand, leaving Mondel’s, and I hear a deep sound like I only hear on the rare occasions we go to church. He is a tiny man in dark clothes that are torn in different places. I remember his shoulder being exposed to the cold sunlight. My mother drops my hand to search her pockets for money as he keeps singing. The tone is as soothing as the lingering smell of melted chocolate. I see Kevin again on these walks and eventually in front of the building where I live. One year, my mother brings him upstairs to give him a piece of my birthday cake and he sings again, this time happy birthday. Days before, he intervenes between her and a potential rapist as she arrives home late from work. I know unspoken rules are broken when she brings this man into our building but I am proud and his voice takes me back to Mondel’s that cold day and the warmth of my mother’s hands.

Sometimes we stop for wings and fries at The West End Gate, an expansive dive bar where William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg notoriously performed on a regularly drunken basis. The tables are etched by knife carvings that have dates I cannot fathom, like 1968 and 1977. I remember tracing my finger into the carvings and listening to stories of poets who used to spit lines of lyrical obscenity on a small raised platform in the back of the dive. It is a place of old poems and mysterious men and loaded nachos. It is a continuous fall down the rabbit hole and into wonderland. The world opens into a kaleidoscope of shadows, colors, banquets of candies, and long concrete streets dotted with homeless singers and lost poets.

 

Borderland

My father teaches art and architecture at Columbia University, a sprawling red-brick and white limestone array of structures. My mother earns her doctorate here so the campus is a constant in my life, coloring more memories than I can count. The lawns and open plaza with two overwhelming fountains that spout water straight into the air and back into a surrounding pool are two places on campus that substitute for a backyard. All the faculty children play here, running the noisy and shaky ramp meant for wheelchairs and pulling brightly colored flowers from the manicured grounds. I find my place at the edge of the fountains because here ladybugs collect and frequently drown. I remember bursts of red flowers, so distant from my perch on the fountain’s edge. The red shells of the ladybugs are more compelling and my favorite pastime becomes rescuing the water-logged and semi-conscious creatures from the fountain.

 "Borderland" Columbia University, circa 1987Columbia University, circa 1987

One autumn I bring home a rescued ladybug even though my father tells me it is dead. I keep its tiny body in a box my mother gives me. The box has a tan seashell as a top, and it is lined with mirrors on the inside and mother-of-pearl on the outside. The motionless ladybug lay there on the windowsill through a blizzard and then a thaw. When the air is warm enough, I open the box. I blink, and the ladybug vanishes. Maybe it blew out the window, my father says. Ladybugs hibernate, says my mother. She has flown away with the spring air.

Columbia sits at the border of Harlem and also slightly above it, perched at a higher elevation. This means that Harlem is first a picture out of my living room window. The late 1980s in Harlem means rows and rows of burn-out buildings. Police sirens and the Mr. Softee ice cream truck jingle are sounds from below that slip in through open windows. The windowsill is a place to sit because at night there are fires burning in the park that separates our small area from Harlem. During the day, you can see into the park and it looks like a vast and desolate wilderness. In fact, in the 1980s, it is a kind of no-man’s land reserved for junkies and homeless people. Not many people cross this border but one day I am sitting on the windowsill and three shots ring out. Suddenly my mother is there and I am carried away. Later, I hear my mother and my father talk about the black Exeter student from Harlem who was killed by a police officer for no clear reason other than the fact that he had crossed the park and started walking up toward the university. The rationale behind his killing remains controversial, a symbol of the clash between an ivory tower and the forgotten ghetto beneath it.

"Borderland" View of Harlem in 1985, from the living room window of apt 83.View of Harlem in 1985, from the living room window of apt 83

Harlem is not just a place of fiery nights and distant gunshots. Harlem is also the manic bustle of 125th street, where motorized cars hang from toy store ceilings. My mother buys me one with whitewall tires, 1920s style. The smell of African incense and the roasting meat from street vendors is not the smell of melting chocolate like at Mondel’s. This is the smell of the street, food and religion and grease all rising from the pavement. There are men like Kevin who live in the street but none of them sing when we pass by.

The last time I remember seeing Kevin I am coming down a winding staircase of a building that belongs to Columbia. My mother is with me and when he sees her, he tell us both that the university guards arrested him for using the bathroom to pee and this is why he has been gone so long. I am ashamed when he says this even though my mother calls them pigs for taking him away. I am ashamed of the dangerous park and the clean white buildings and the guards in their blue suits that call me honey when I pass by to go to my father’s office.

The borderland that is Morningside Heights is a collision of poor and privileged during the mid to late 1980s, but apartment 83 with its jungle of plants and windows onto other worlds is still a place of quiet love.

 

Gems and Bones

The first time I see a six-foot amethyst geode I am standing in a darkened room surrounded by towering gems that have been carved out in the center like narrow caves. These gems are housed by The Museum of Natural History, a place my father brings me regularly so we can stare up at the gigantic stones. Above us in a room as bright as the gem room is dark, a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex is encircled by a metal gate as if he might escape. I am four years old and easily able to imagine a time when monsters roamed the earth but the bones are bleached white and held together by shiny chrome screws, like the skeleton hanging in my mother’s darkroom. My father and I ride the escalator between the gems and the bones, going back and forth to examine each. The dark purple hues of the amethyst and the striped green malachite are like his paintings, except the colors to do not crash and collide like they do on canvas.

 "Gems and Bones" My mother's darkroom, 1984My mother’s darkroom, 1984

My father’s smell of turpentine and oil paint comes from his hours locked away in a painting studio at the university. I visit him there a few times, shocked and delighted by the way he splashes paint at the canvas and by the way his balding head and calloused hands are spattered with color specks when he is done. There are rows and rows of wooden easels, some cracked and repaired and others freshly varnished. This is his factory, a place where his smell becomes the smell of art and safety, where canvasses appear and are hung like smashed geodes mounted on the walls.

My mother’s darkroom doesn’t scare me, even though the light is pure red most the time and the skeleton hangs in the corner against a black velvet background. The jaw is loose so she lifts me up and I snap it open and closed, as if bones can come alive and speak. I name him “skellie” and soon my mother is teaching me to develop film, shaking canisters and watching images appear like magic as the chemicals seep into the paper. The darkroom makes me dream of gypsies because of tarot cards pinned to the walls and the clutter of religious items. Pictures of my late uncle and late brother are scattered about and here in the darkroom is where I begin to learn about my brother’s death. The red light colors everything. My mother’s hair looks almost black. Family stories sound like magic tales about long-lost people. She plays Stevie Wonder songs as we work, and when we leave the darkroom, the plain white light of the living room is like wandering out of Wonderland and into reality.

 

Violin

My grandmother goes by “nannie,” the name French children use for their grandmothers. She doesn’t want to be called grandma. The French excuse comes up when I am fifteen and I am bold enough to ask why I cannot call her grandma. I want something irrevocable, some variant of grandmother. It is late in her life and we have fallen in love over mixed drinks and shopping trips and manicures during her rebellious months-long trips to visit me and my mother. She tells me lifetimes of stories, the life she lived as a wife and the life as a violinist denied to her.

"Violin".      My grandmother, Virginia de Borse, circa 1921My grandmother, Virginia de Borse, circa 1921

The first time I try to learn to play the violin I am four and unhappy. I sit for a photo after the first lesson, scowling and frustrated by sore fingers. The teacher has forceful hands that pushed my fingers to reach the notes. That year my grandmother sends a miniature stuffed terrier with a note attached to his neck: “He is afraid of thunderstorms. He is lonely.” By this time my grandmother and I have met several times, but I never remember her afterwards. I remember the house on Smith Street. The attic. A violin she has refused to play since my uncle’s suicide and stories of lost chances to go study in New York City when she was young. The terrier sits near my violin at the top of my closet until the night of a storm that brightens the sky above Harlem with thick bolts of lightening like streaks of daylight breaking through. I watch from the living room window and then take the terrier out of the closet. I wonder if he is really lonely. You were born in a thunderstorm, my mother reminds me.

  Me at the age 4, having just finished a violin lesson. Circa 1985.Me at the age 4, having just finished a violin lesson. Circa 1985

The house on Smith Street smells like Avon products from my grandmother’s cache of beauty products and vanilla tobacco from my grandfather’s pipe. I am about four the first time we meet. He lifts me on to his lap while I struggle to tie my shoe, frightened that he is even bigger than my own father. He tells dirty jokes and tells me stories from the Old Testament. The details of the jokes are gone but the story of Jacob’s struggle to reconcile with God in place of his own brother is with me. My grandmother is a woman who sits behind a wall of silence, even when she giggles or rises to vacuum.

I find the attic hidden behind a door with a short flight of steps that are too steep for me. The attic is a place of living ghosts. The beams of the ceiling are exposed and cobwebbed but the lighting is bright and the stacks of clutter seem to have their own logic. I look down from the beams and see a wooden bench. He sits on it, a white plaster shell of a former person. His face is unpainted and expressionless, a face made of places where bones might protrude. Night in Glens Falls is blacker than the city and the window behind him throws my reflection back at me with his and we are doubled and I am scared. But not scared enough to run and I watch him in his hunched-over position. This is the closest I have come to a likeness of my Uncle David other than in photographs, which usually show a dark-skinned man cooking or wrapped around congo drums. I have seen plaster casts before in my parents’ art studio but nothing like this, nothing that captures the hollowness of a man whose death was ruled a suicide.

After learning the smells and finding the attic, I remember leaving Smith Street for the first time. I am afraid of my grandmother. We are eating dinner and the crack of her palm against my cousin’s cheek is like the gunshots I hear back in the city, but this is closer and this is my cousin who can punch numbers into the phone pad and make it ring back like magic. I remember the sound and feeling sick in my stomach. My mother’s voice was louder than the slap and angrier. I don’t remember when we left, only standing in the street facing my godmother while my mother and grandfather talked on the porch. My grandmother and cousin did not come out of the house. The day was cold, the kind of barren cold that sets in after Christmas when nearly every day is the sky is grey or white. My grandmother goes silent, along with my grandfather, for four years.

When I meet my grandmother again I am ten years old and I think of this attic in a home where she raised seven children and gave her hands over from music to ushering her children and grandchildren in and out of life. I am 15 before she ever mentions death to me and then it is only to say, “I live with it every day.” My grandfather is at her side when she says it and he nods but neither look at me.

By the time I am ten, my grandmother is living in central Florida, a lush overgrown place where alligators wander onto highways and lizards dart across sun-scorched grass. I visit with my mother twice, once taking a road trip down the east coast on our way. The sun toasts my skin two shades of darker each time I am there. My grandmother is quiet in Florida, nearly silent, just as she had been in Glens Falls. My grandfather still tells Old Testament stories, although now his mornings begin with whiskey. The house is sprawling and modular this time instead of brick. The southern sun pushes through every curtain until even shadows disappear. My grandmother wears black boots, pointy and shiny like a witch. She stares at them so much in her silences that I start to stare with her. She stares at them especially when my grandfather speaks. Gook, he says to her, and she never talks back. He says it one day when we are sealed indoors, hiding from 103 degrees of spring heat. I am hot and angry about this place where people use racial slurs and the heat does not relent for even a day. Where’d you learn to hate? I ask my grandfather. Why am I even in your house, old man? I think to myself. He waits for my mother to chastise me but she doesn’t. When he answers, he does not tell me why he hates:

At the height of my military career, I am an intelligence officer over a battalion of men. I make decisions in a split fraction of a second because men’s lives depend on me. One day I am guarding my camp and an Asian woman is pushing her baby carriage, back and forth, back and forth, over a bridge. As she passes, explosions begin that carry through the camp. I wait long enough to lose at least one man. When she is within sight, I stand up and shoot her in the head at long-range. I make sure the baby dies with her. I had to do it.

Days later, a storm takes Florida that is mythic in its darkness and battering rain. Tiny frogs stick to the windows with suction cup feet. I am afraid to go outside. I sit on my grandmother’s bed with her, her white German Shepherd, and my mother. I listen to her tell my mother that the war still lives in my grandfather so vividly that he has slept every night with a gun under his pillow since he came home in the 1940s. The gun points toward her head and does every night, she says, but she is also pulling out her violin as she talks. The antique violin, casketed in a peeling case she has kept since tenth grade, is made of wood so old that I count the tiny cracks along the edges when she opens the case. The story of being forbidden to attend Juilliard by her mother stays with me. She would not be a mother or a wife if she had been allowed to pursue music, she says. She promises to give me the violin then, and silently I pledge to learn to play.

The second time I try to play the violin I am using my grandmother’s instrument and she is flying between New York City and Florida with uncharacteristic bursts of independence. I am 15 and for a moment her silences are punctuated by the roar of engine jets and the squeaking of  her violin bow in my hands.  My grandfather makes one trip with her and lays a shotgun across my mother’s kitchen table. I wander in and out to get a snack before I realize what he is saying. No one will break my family up or take my wife, he is saying to my mother. The violin is yours, she is saying to me as she packs.

I never learn to play my grandmother’s violin. But it stays with me, always with me, shrouded in its case from 1935,  like a living memory. I am still exiled in New York City but also rooted here now, in this city where my grandmother was forbidden to go and where my mother was left to wander alone. When my grandmother leaves, passing her violin to me, I know I will never see her again.  And here, in accepting what is given to me, my childhood draws to a close.

—Tiara Winter-Schorr

Tiara Winter-Schorr

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Tiara Winter-Schorr decided to become a writer 12 years ago in one of Douglas Glover’s classes at the University at Albany-SUNY. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is beginning an MFA in Fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the summer of 2013. She lives in Manhattan with her mother. See also her earlier essay “What It’s Like Living Here.”

Jan 112012
 

Denise Evans Durkin writes poems that glow with a gentle melancholy (all memory is tinged with melancholy) unexpectedly laced with joy and wonder. They are wonderful to read, not just for their warm humanity, but for their loving attention to detail, details that seem to accrete spirit and luminescence as the poems develop. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Putnam County, New York, with her husband. She wishes me to note that the poem “Letter to My Sister from Bellevue’s Prison Ward” includes a line from Gil Scott Heron’s “Dirty Low-Down.”  These are her first published poems.

dg

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Impedance
………(circa 1979)

The girl downstairs waits mostly. Sitting on her luggage
by the cattails, side of the road. Embroidered each star
on the velvet pillow of sky — they glitter
through the pin-pricks.

She waits, lonesome as the notions in her felted sewing box —
mismatched buttons, thimbles and threads in bright
remembered colors — bobbins and hat pins —
good things going away.

She’s there in the spaces where the dime store and
the pay phones used to be. The cart that sold ice-cream and
hot waffles. Relics.

Seeping cold. Click, drag, stop — over
imperfect stones. Her gradual world — ohms build
between receiver and vintage turntable on the dresser
in the bedroom she has not visited in thirty years.
Glass & leaves falling. Dust falling down in the hush —

.

Letter to My Sister from Bellevue’s Prison Ward

Traveling up from blue-black dreaming
those first pin-pricks of pale blue light give such sudden joy.

Once at a farm I saw eggs that color blue; the class learned
about farms, about far-off things and places where people
know their food, know their land and don’t live like we do.

Do you remember when we used to sing it?
Said I wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who put those ideas in your head?
You closed your eyes when you sang back up; we got it right.

Mornings are my best time — even the doctors agree — when I wake
full of hope, and my hope is the color of morning, and my eyes

the color of the sea and I know all that the seas know.

A thrum of bees where my heart should be when my eyes flutter
open mother your face dissolving in the water swirling in the silver bowl —

were you here in your white nurses’ shoes? I thought I saw you
in your white dress adjusting the tubes that feed me, that dispense
the medicines, checking my bandages, and my restraints I thought
I felt all the little red lights on the living machines
silver mechanical fireflies that blink and glow redder
through the gauze of my forgetting pieces of what I thought was
my life and I can no longer remember how I got here —
I watch your white shoes walk away squeaking on the tiled floor.

Don’t think I don’t know nothing but the sea stays around
long enough to get old — and all I do in here is imagine
this gossamer daylight everyday — all just going by —

.

Come September

This morning the darkness is thicker — like spider’s webs
spun especially for the heavy snow they know is coming.
Crickets sing in the perpetual twilight of the field beyond my patio —
my small wilderness — where even now leaves are falling.
The vine wound up around that oak; some of its leaves
are already red. This is how I measure time: by leaves
changing color, by feeling the dew clinging to grass,
to wildflowers, waiting for the late summer sun.

The day you left draws nearer now.
Noted on my calendar, of course, but I don’t need reminders.
This is how you return to me: in the small twigs I pick up
for kindling, in the rain battering my old house,
beating the glass skylight, letting me know everything
is the way it’s supposed to be. I walk my solitude
past the fading clapboard and the weeds, deer at dusk
and whitecaps on the lake. These are what you left me.

.

Fall Notebook: Prayer & Dream

Inside a deep longing I dream alone by the sea.
Wooden table laid ready with black beans, rice and cornbread.
I imagine an indigo sky and wild horses.

Here I dream closer to the weather, to the light, to any decision.
Angel, how long is this bridge?

Over my heart on a lanyard of silver stars, my tiny imagined locket
opens into a mansion where my necessary delights reside.
These rooms full of one wish: for the sisters who
look in on me when darkness falls, who brush sweet almond oil
into my skin, my hair. Lord, my needs are small.

Mother returns in firelight, starshine, moonlight — her fingers
touching the top of my head, reminder that everything is what it is.

Deep cobalt sky and then the moon laying on its cold blessing —

.

Soothsayer
………spoken by my mother

Rootworker they call them in the Carolinas where I was married far from Georgia
where I was born and raised — farther still from these misty Coney Island streets
strewn with blown paper, dirt and sand.

Across the street from the Mount Zion Baptist Church where I sing in the choir,
collect tithing baskets and light white votives at sunset, my sisters wait at the bus stop —

old women with knitting in their straw totes, they nod without looking for me —
like they know I’m in here —

and they do. They know rootworkers are never welcome in this church or any other —
unnecessary anyway with the devil in the first pew every Sunday loudly singing
hymns he knows much better than my choir ladies in their cloches tipped down
on one side threaded with beads like bits of sea glass keeping close together
moving in tune as they file down into the pews, careful
not to touch him whom they have always known.

Lord, I am your child, walking and talking right, gone to the river and
baptized into the ease of your arms, my heavenly home.

Choir leader of my church under this indigo sky —
vesper-quiet in here with this cross and these candles
constant flame of love in my heart —

ruler of this elemental kitchen magic
my sisters call me Soothsayer
and I know what I know.

—Denise Evans Durkin

.
.

Jan 052012
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Utne Reader, The Best of the Alternative Press, reprinted Sion Dayson’s excellent essay “Life Lessons in Père Lachaise Cemetery” in its July/August, 2012, issue. This is terrific recognition for Sion’s work and for the magazine. Congratulations all around. Raise a glass of Talisker, everyone.

See all of Sion’s work on NC here.

dg

 

Life Lessons in Père Lachaise

By Sion Dayson

 
Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here…

In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.

 —From “Winter Solstice” by Rebecca Parker

For the past three and a half years, I’ve lived a ten-minute walk from Père Lachaise, the famed Parisian cemetery that’s home to many historic luminaries – everyone from Abelard to Chopin, Edith Piaf to Marcel Proust.

In recent weeks, talk has centered on writer Oscar Wilde; his tomb now stands encircled by thick glass, a barrier aimed to protect the stone from endless admirers’ kisses. (Of course people have already started leaving their lipstick prints on the Plexiglas instead).

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