son, don’t you ever put off to tomorrow trying to be a good man, a honest man, hardworking, loving man, don’t put it off cause that gets a man in trouble, deep-down trouble, cause time is trouble, time full of trouble, and time on your hands when your hands ain’t doing right fills up your time with trouble, then it’s too late, your time to do right gone, you in the middle of doing evil or trying not to or trying to undo evil you done and time gone, too late, like me in a cage a dozen and some years locked up behind bars for killing a fella didn’t even know his name till I hears it in the courtroom and lucky he black everybody say or you wouldn’a made it to no damn courtroom, no jail, crackers string your black ass up, the other prisoners say, you lucky nigger, they say, and cackle, grin, and shake they heads and moan and some nights make you want to cry like a baby all them long, long years when if I ain’t slaving in the fields under a hellfire sun I’m sitting in a cell staring at a man’s blood on a juke-joint floor, never get my time back once I yanks a bowie knife out my belt and he waving his knife and mine quicker finds his heart, the very same bowie knife my father Jim Daniels give to me and John Brown give to him, said, Use this hard, cold steel, Mr. Jim Daniels, on any man try to rob your freedom, same knife old John Brown stole from the crackers like he stole my daddy, mama, my sister and brother, and a passel of other Negroes from crackers down in Kansas and Missouri, it’s too late, too late, knife in my hand, I watched a man bleed to death inside those stone walls every day year after year, hard time, son, you wait too long to do right it’s too late and you can’t do nothing, can’t change time, and that’s that, like the fact I never seen my grands, never seen you but once, one time up there on the Canada side in that cold and snow and wind, your mama carried you all them miles, had you wrapped up like you some little Eskimo or little papoose. It was only once only that one time I ever seen you, there you was with your mother, she come cross with you on the ferry, and me and her talked or mize well tell it like it was, she talked and I kinda halfway listened but I didn’t want to hear nothing I wasn’t ready to hear, nodded my head, smiled, chucked you under your chubby double chins, patted her shoulder, smooched her beautiful brown Indin-color colored cheek a couple times, always liked your mama, but the problem was I didn’t know then what I know now, son, or excuse me, yes I did, I knowed it just as clear as day, course I did, just didn’t want to hear it cause I had other plans, knucklehead, young-blood plans, what I’ma do with a wife and baby, it was rough up there, barely feed myself, keep a roof over my head, if you could call a tent a roof, so how am I supposed to look out for youall, anyway, it was only that once I seen you, then same day she’s back on the ferry, she’s gone, you gone, nothing, no word for lots and lots of years cept a little tad or tidbit the way news come and go in prison or hear this or that happened from people passing through up there in Canada, me asking or somebody telling tales they don’t even know my name who I am or know you or know who your mama and who you is to me or who my peoples is, but I’d overhear this or that in somebody’s story and so in a manner of speaking I kept up, knew you still alive, then your mama dead and you married living on Pierce Road in Detroit, three grandkids I ain’t never laid eyes on, never will now . . . Excuse me, Miss, you got that all down so far or maybe I should slow up or maybe just go ahead and shut up now, stop now cause how you think this letter find him anyway even if I say it right and you catch every word I say on paper it still don’t sound right to me hearing myself talk this story, it just makes me sad, and it’s a damned shame, a mess anyway, too late to tell my son my daddy, his granddaddy, Jim Daniels, give me John Brown’s name because John Brown carried us out from slavery in the fall of 1858, my brother and sister, mama, and Jim Daniels, my father cross seven states, 1,100 miles, eighty-two days in wagons, railroad trains, on foot, boats, along with six other Negroes John Brown stole from slavery in Kansas and Missouri and Daddy say one them other six, a woman slave, ask John Brown, “How many miles, how many days, Captain Brown, we got to go before freedom?” and John Brown answer her and the lady slave say back, “That’s a mighty far piece you say, Captain, sir. Ole Massa pitch him a terrible conniption fit we ain’t back to fix his dinner,” and then me born on one them last couple days before they cross the river to freedom, so my daddy Jim Daniels named me John Brown, he told me, and if I’da been more than half a man when you and your mama come up there I woulda took care of youall and passed my name on to you and you be another John Brown whatever else my sweet Ella called you you’d be John Brown, too, and if you knew the story of the name, son, maybe you would have passed the name on, too, John Brown, and maybe not, Miss, what do you think, Miss, is it too late, too much time gone by, Miss, what do you think.
10
Along an edge of the Gulf of Morbihan I walk through woods, on gravelly, rocky beaches, in sand, on a narrow walkway atop a mile-long stone seawall, then climb a bluff overlooking the wall where I can peer way, way out to dark clumps of island in the gulf’s glittering water, towards open sea invisible beyond the islands. I imagine an actor assigned to deliver the colored John Brown monologue in a film version of “JB & FD.” The actor asks me why I choose to make the nice lady in the script white, not colored. Asks why I invented a colored John Brown.
Powerful sea winds have shaped trees I stand next to on the bluff, winds that would shape me, too, no doubt, if I stood here very long. Trees with thick, ancient-looking gray trunks, bark deeply furrowed as old John Brown’s skin, multiple trunks entwined, branches big as trunks, twisted, tortured, though a few trees shoot more or less straight up to vast crowns that form a layered green canopy of feathery needles high overhead. A row of maybe seven, eight survivors of probably hundreds of years of battering wind, and spaced among them another four or five cut down to stumps a couple yards across you could sit on and stare out at endless water beyond the edge of land, beyond the seawall and Roman ruins below.
Next to trees, still standing and fallen, I forget who I am, who I’m supposed to be, and it is perfection. Doesn’t matter who I am or believed I was or all the shitty jobs performed to get to France—I listen for the voices of Frederick Douglass and John Brown sealed within the silence of those huge trees. Trees I don’t know a name for, thinking maybe pine or fir or conifer, and I never will need to look up the name because for a small instant I’m inside them, and it lasts forever.
DARK MATTER
We go out to dinner and discuss eating.
We go out to dinner and discuss the economy’s downswings and upswings.
We go out to dinner and discuss the importance of staying physically fit and the difficulties in busy, aging lives of maintaining a consistent, healthy program of exercise.
We go out to dinner and discuss Vladimir Putin’s rumored kleptomania, how the U.S. State Department allegedly advises a famous coach who just returned from conducting basketball clinics in Russia that maybe the best course of action would be not to lodge a complaint with the UN about his NBA championship ring which had gone missing under extremely suspicious circumstances, while the coach was a guest at Putin’s dacha, but to live and let live and they, the U.S. Government, would ante up for a replacement ring.
We go out to dinner and discuss choices after a waitress—long legs, minidress, coffee-au-lait-colored skin, intricately cornrowed hair—squatted in the darkness at the end of our table, peering over its edge as she articulated in her oddly precise diction subtleties we could anticipate, surprises far beyond anything words on the menu able to express. Wonderfully enticing items, she convinced us, not because we believed she’d peeked at the chef preparing them but because she was a tasty appetizer we were already sampling down there between our table and the next row of tables, her pretty legs folded under her, big eyes, pretty face popping up Kilroy-like where we had no reason to expect a face to be.
We go out to dinner and discuss public schools supposed to educate thirteen-year-old colored boys, public schools that taught them nothing, or schools anyway that did not teach them not to shoot each other inside school buses. Public schools where white cops learned it was okay to shoot down unarmed thirteen-year-old colored boys in the streets.
We go out to dinner and discuss growing up, the
