days. Mom wasn’t in any black women’s club and the Quakerism of her college pacifism meant that her committees in later years were mostly white.
Dad was an only child. His father died when he was young, of a heart attack on the train where he worked as a porter. My grandmother was a schoolteacher who ended up making paintings of photographs she liked in National Geographic . I remembered her on the third floor for a while. Then I hated going to see her in the nursing home. Her canvases were strung up around the back porch like the flags of all nations. Because Mom’s father’s family hated her mother, Mom grew up as an only child. I once accused Mom and Dad of having me just so Solomon wouldn’t be an only child.
I didn’t always feel that I belonged to the three of them, the walnut sitting with almonds. Because I was darker than my brother and my parents, to my way of thinking, had I been able to put shame into words back then, they had an expectation of acceptance I was denied. They would always look like decent people, the right sort of black people, whereas I had to talk for a few minutes before white people decided not to throw me out of wherever I was. Cello wasn’t light-skinned either, but she’d been a prodigy all her life. Her soft yet regal manner opened every door.
Mom wrung her hands when she saw me. I knew I looked terrible, a walking, sebaceous coffee bean. Cello had not reported me, but Mom and Dad knew I had moved out before I left Berlin. Mom concluded that Cello and I had had a disagreement of some kind, but she wasn’t going to push me about it. This would not have been the first time something had blown up between us. I’d been there awhile, as Dram said, and that was enough of an explanation. That Cello had kept quiet about the cocaine put me back in the sleuth mood, but there was nothing I could do about it. Mom studied me enough as it was. They used to be so close, Mom and Cello.
Dad had his own sheen on. Climactic tournaments in the sports he followed were only weeks away. Every year he parked Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., in a chair in front of the TV and kept up a running commentary on the games. Sometimes Solomon was in town and Dad had someone who answered and argued. Plus, I could tell as soon as I stepped inside the house: there were no crazies in residence. Dad was a different man when he’d had Mom to himself for a spell. He was outgoing and funny and put syrup smiles on the pancakes he should not have been eating.
* * *
In 1934, the Shay brothers, Ralston and Reginald, founded The American Eagle , and for a while there, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was a serious competitor in the weekly black newspaper market. It had an opera column, record reviews, poetry reviews, a very popular medical advice bureau, and a religion reporter who had an inadvertently entertaining way with the latest Baptist scandals. Its pages were open to a number of local cartoonists. The real star was Uncle Ralston himself, my mother’s uncle, who doubled as the sports reporter.
It had not been as easy to get back to the Alabama State Normal School as they had thought. Why the Shay brothers could never go back, they didn’t want anyone to find out, Cello’s grandfather liked to say. But that was a bit of make-believe, tough-dude publicity. My dad said that the Shay brothers worked one summer at a resort hotel in Wisconsin in order to earn their school fees, but they lost all their money to hustlers in Chicago. Their father told them not to come back to Alabama and they didn’t.
The Eagle appealed to obsessives among Chicago’s black residents, and given how crowded and rough that big place was, there were thousands of people who found something in the paper they could lose themselves in. Uncle Ralston analyzed first basemen and heavyweights, black and white, with such contrariness that he incited readers in Chicago and in other cities where the Eagle was distributed to send
Dad was an only child. His father died when he was young, of a heart attack on the train where he worked as a porter. My grandmother was a schoolteacher who ended up making paintings of photographs she liked in National Geographic . I remembered her on the third floor for a while. Then I hated going to see her in the nursing home. Her canvases were strung up around the back porch like the flags of all nations. Because Mom’s father’s family hated her mother, Mom grew up as an only child. I once accused Mom and Dad of having me just so Solomon wouldn’t be an only child.
I didn’t always feel that I belonged to the three of them, the walnut sitting with almonds. Because I was darker than my brother and my parents, to my way of thinking, had I been able to put shame into words back then, they had an expectation of acceptance I was denied. They would always look like decent people, the right sort of black people, whereas I had to talk for a few minutes before white people decided not to throw me out of wherever I was. Cello wasn’t light-skinned either, but she’d been a prodigy all her life. Her soft yet regal manner opened every door.
Mom wrung her hands when she saw me. I knew I looked terrible, a walking, sebaceous coffee bean. Cello had not reported me, but Mom and Dad knew I had moved out before I left Berlin. Mom concluded that Cello and I had had a disagreement of some kind, but she wasn’t going to push me about it. This would not have been the first time something had blown up between us. I’d been there awhile, as Dram said, and that was enough of an explanation. That Cello had kept quiet about the cocaine put me back in the sleuth mood, but there was nothing I could do about it. Mom studied me enough as it was. They used to be so close, Mom and Cello.
Dad had his own sheen on. Climactic tournaments in the sports he followed were only weeks away. Every year he parked Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., in a chair in front of the TV and kept up a running commentary on the games. Sometimes Solomon was in town and Dad had someone who answered and argued. Plus, I could tell as soon as I stepped inside the house: there were no crazies in residence. Dad was a different man when he’d had Mom to himself for a spell. He was outgoing and funny and put syrup smiles on the pancakes he should not have been eating.
* * *
In 1934, the Shay brothers, Ralston and Reginald, founded The American Eagle , and for a while there, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was a serious competitor in the weekly black newspaper market. It had an opera column, record reviews, poetry reviews, a very popular medical advice bureau, and a religion reporter who had an inadvertently entertaining way with the latest Baptist scandals. Its pages were open to a number of local cartoonists. The real star was Uncle Ralston himself, my mother’s uncle, who doubled as the sports reporter.
It had not been as easy to get back to the Alabama State Normal School as they had thought. Why the Shay brothers could never go back, they didn’t want anyone to find out, Cello’s grandfather liked to say. But that was a bit of make-believe, tough-dude publicity. My dad said that the Shay brothers worked one summer at a resort hotel in Wisconsin in order to earn their school fees, but they lost all their money to hustlers in Chicago. Their father told them not to come back to Alabama and they didn’t.
The Eagle appealed to obsessives among Chicago’s black residents, and given how crowded and rough that big place was, there were thousands of people who found something in the paper they could lose themselves in. Uncle Ralston analyzed first basemen and heavyweights, black and white, with such contrariness that he incited readers in Chicago and in other cities where the Eagle was distributed to send
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