with R & B, the Dells and Diablos, Drifters and Spaniels and Midnighters singing my songs on WAMO. Love music mixed with worry music mixed with dance music mixed with desire and fear of things I didn’t know the names of yet. Worried maybe I never would. Worried it all might vanish.
No light brightens the crack below the door. My father snapped it off when he came in and discovered my mother not at home. After three days gone, I’d begun to believe he’d left for good, but then I hear his key in the lock and he’s back home that night before my mother. Mother late. Father early. Strange turnabout. Me faking sleep. I wasn’t spying on my father, but I could hear his breathing, heartbeats, pounding of his thoughts, his big hands gripping his knees. I could hear his stillness in the overstuffed armchair everybody called Daddy’s Chair. His impatience and anger fill the silence with unthinkable acts, unspeakable words, hard and heavy as fists.
I pretended not to know why I was scared, though if I had tried, I could have said why. I was old enough to understand nearly everything. It was all in the music. In the talk in Henderson’s Barbershop. Woman who’s a wife and mother got no damned business out in the street, don’t care whatever goddamned sister you say you with, no goddamned business out in the street this goddamn time of night. Did I hear those particular words that night or are they blues words, gospel words, barbershop words dreamed, heard before the fact or after the fact of my mother’s body striking the floor, a sound that would have awakened me even if I’d been asleep as far away as the place old thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone Reverend Felder of Homewood AME Zion promised God would pitch bad black boys.
The singer’s daughter tells her brother she overheard one of the church young folk ask: Willie Mae Ford Smith. Who that? Then Say Amen, Somebody’s camera retreats for a long shot to frame the once-upon-a-time gospel queen’s children within the airplane hangar immensity of an empty steel shell with steel girders holding up a steel groined, vaulted ceiling, the section of a Chicago train station they reached by driving earlier in the video down a ramp at whose entrance light blazed in a checkerboard pattern from overhead grates, shafts of smoking brilliance pouring into the obscurity below, obscurity only slightly relieved here, inside the station, by illumination from begrimed panels in a ceiling miles away it seems from where the brother and sister stand now after they have parked underground, exited outdoors, then entered the station. They instinctively huddle closer together as they talk in whispers, as any two people or small group of persons likely would talk in a gloomy space that dwarfs them, dwarfs their voices whether they speak softly or shout. Big-boned, wide-hipped, large brown people whispering small things, simple, deep things, a call-and-response of reminiscence, holding on, letting go until there is no bottom, no sides, no ceiling to the station, no secrets, no down or up or come or go.
I pause the tape. Is it the Twelfth Street Station. What does it remember. Is a train station able to gaze at itself, revive the past, double it, a double as quiet as the face, the moving lips of my reflection within a mirror. Quiet as silences within the silences of Thelonious Monk’s piano. During the Twelfth Street Station’s heyday did people’s dreams truly float above the platform upon which I picture myself waiting for an Illinois Central train to arrive or depart, a platform lined with cardboard suitcases, ancient steamer trunks, duffel bags, shopping bags, string-tied bundles and cartons, colored girls carrying everything they own in a warm package they cradle in their arms, all of that dreaming and waiting, waiting, every shadow and echo and breath of those lives dust and grit somebody brooms away each morning from the station’s concrete floor.
I remember Chicago at night, a tapestry of winking, blinking lights out the windows of an elevated train, lights which are pinpricks in a black winding sheet draped over a snowbound city. And once in a taxi, approaching the city in daytime from O’Hare, I stared at the stark verticality of church steeples, minarets, smokestacks, waves of skyscrapers, a gray backdrop that recedes and draws nearer, both at once, skeletal towers trussed by power lines, sheaves of dirt poor dirty row after ramshackle row of houses, blocks of low-rise apartment buildings, public housing warrens twenty stories high, acres of demolished blocks, blocks and succeeding blocks of concrete, brick, stone-faced canyons the hawk rules in winter and no matter how much you bundle up or hoody-up humping through alleys, wind-tunnel streets, body slanted at a forty-five-degree angle like a character in a cartoon, your eyes tear, teeth chatter, no mama to wipe your snotty nose.
I also remember Chicago in a photo tucked in an old family album. Who had scribbled Chicago and people’s names on the photo’s yellowed backing. Faded, indecipherable names. Names of dressed-up folks maybe on their way to a splendid party. Chicago was a surprise in the Pittsburgh family album. Who are these strangers floating past, fancy people, handsome people in furs and expensive overcoats, my sturdy brown people light on their feet as ghosts. Do they live on another planet inhabiting the planet I inhabit. One scene, one photo, many universes dissolve, splash, one into the other always. I still possess Emmett Till’s photo from September 1955 on a page torn out of Jet magazine that Aunt Geraldine saved and gave me thirty years later.
I was fourteen the first time I saw the photo in Jet. Emmett Till’s age that summer they murdered him. Him colored, me colored. Him a boy, me too. Him so absolutely dead he’s my death, too. Fuzzy replicas of the photo appeared in colored newspapers—Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News—the image circulating, recycled decades later in Eyes on the Prize, a documentary history of the civil rights movement in which I saw the horrific picture of dead Emmett Till’s face staring back from my TV screen and freeze-framed it. Courage mustered finally, half a century after the fact. I did not look away. Hoped if I stared hard maybe the photo would wither, wrinkle, flames curl its edges, consume it. No screams, no agony, no sputtering frying chicken crackle like you’d think you’d hear.
I push play and Say Amen, Somebody resumes. More quiet exchanges between brother and sister, their voices barely audible to one another above the stillness. Are they afraid words might disturb sleeping ghosts. Delay the Till train’s slide into the station or its glide away. As if words could stop a train. Stop time. No. Not even words a brother and sister keep inside themselves, will you bury me or will I bury you, not even those unsayable words shouted out loud could waken their mother, stop the Till train.
Willie Mae Ford Smith’s grown-up children under the steel arc of roof remember fine clothes, fine cars, taxis. Black limos rolling up to the curb. So much glitter and glamour. The brother recalls veteran redcaps as well as neophytes shaking their heads in wonder, Who that. Where they going. Where they coming from. Boy oh boy. Their mother, Willie Mae Ford, sang church music thick with blues, ready or not, like it or not, you get blues licked up in gospel. Didn’t want Mama when she young and just starting out, and before long they standing in line in bitter cold and snow paying good money to hear Mama and now the young folks see her in church every Sunday forgot her name.
Later, leaving the station, one sibling frowns, the other grins in response. Whole lifetimes flicker on the TV screen compressed into a single glance they exchange. One expression scrubbed away instantaneously by the next, light to dark to light, too fast to follow, he’s your brother, you’re his sister, we’ve done that, been there, no need to go back, to linger or regret or hope. Here we are, here it is, this quiet moment in the station Samboing into every other moment and the black boy chases the tiger fast as the tiger chases him.
Mamie Till listens harder than anyone else for the Till train. Looks closer than anyone else at her dead son’s body, I looked at the ears, the forehead, the lips, the nose, she wrote. She knows the train’s due, perhaps in the station already, the same City of Orleans that carried her live Emmett away two weeks ago, returns today with his corpse, enters the Twelfth Street Station, enters silence sealed under a high, arching ceiling. Silence of dark, swollen thunderclouds, quiet of a storm ready to burst.
ARGO
Nothing closer to truth than truth—but the truth is—not even truth is close to truth.
