How It Was

 

By Rachel Guido deVries

 

 

 

Chapter One

Start in the middle: it is 1974, and I am in Africa, East Africa, Kenya. For the last several months I have lived with my husband, Jim Cooper, in a small village near the Tanzanian Border, Mwaembe, in the Msambweni District. Mwaembe is sixty kilo­meters south of Mombasa, about 20 kilometers from a resort hotel we go to every now and then for a shower with running water, for the Saturday night barbecue that we love and where we watch ashamedly as American tourists act as though the food just might be suspect, and where once, just before returning to the States, we drop our last, hoarded hits of mescaline, a glorious day when we stayed for the entire trip in the water, first the Indian Ocean, playing in the gentle surf, in the hotel pool until close to midnight, and finally in the huge tub in our room.

But most of the time we are in the village, or I am, and it very quickly becomes what I prefer, where I feel I belong. I stay in Mwaembe often alone, while Jim takes the blue Ford Anglia we bought from a slightly loony anthropologist from Minnesota by way of Brooklyn, and drives the six hours or so back to Nairobi, to meet with University people and hob-nob, I guess. I have no memory of what these trips are all about, except that they give me a kind of freedom. I love being with the Digo women, especially Mwanasha, and I learn to speak and cook along with her and the other women and the many many children. I grow comfortable in the crouch, a sort of squatting position that is murder on the thighs until you get it, and we sit for hours that way, crouched and cooking, or peeling cassava or cleaning fish, or stirring the fire under the moonlight, right on the Indian Ocean, and we talk con­stantly. Sometimes the talk is of small things, where to get fish, or maize meal, or who has been recently visited by a pepo. Some­times we venture into other places, and we talk of sex, and Mwanasha’s circumcision, or we have a conversation about being women. She is a mother, I am not. She pities me this, though I mind not at all. Her husband has recently taken a second wife, which she hates. Mwanasha is big and very dark brown and quite beautiful with a sunny grin and an enticing gap between her two front teeth. She has already borne seven children, the youngest, Twalibu, often at her breast as we chat. The new wife is skinny, and has not yet become pregnant, though the marriage is now six months old. Mwanasha loves these details, and says so openly. We crouch around the cook fire, or, especially during Ramadan, we spread leso beneath the moonlight, and dressed in leso our­selves, mine a vivid blue with bright yellow circles, Mwanasha’s a deep red and green and black, we lay back and watch the palm trees wave. A child might bring us mdafu to sip, or some cassava or rice bread or a samosa or two. Sema. A mango. The name of the village: Mwaembe—mango tree. Or Mwanasha takes out her jas­mine oil and slowly rubs it on her feet, and then mine, proclaim­ing at the softness of my American feet. Italian-American feet. So familiar. The company of women and children, the cooking, the touching, the talking about men, the complaining, and the talk of sex. Mwanasha was circumcised, as was the custom when she was a girl, though she will not allow it for her daughters. She will for her sons, a topic she sometimes finds amusing.

It is months into our year there, and I am darkened by the sun to the color of an Indian, perhaps, or a light skinned African. Taken always for native, never mzungu, foreigner, now. Jim is as tall and blonde and blue eyed as ever. We take a ride to Tanzania to buy some Makonde wood carvings. Jim has heard that there are carvers along the road, having fled from what was then Mozam­bique. We stop for tea at an English owned hotel run by a white woman who is American and slightly overweight, and light: light hair, light eyes, and who seems quite sad. Dispirited maybe. Or maybe alcoholic. It sets a pall on the day for me. Jim does not seem to notice, though he certainly noticed my reaction a few weeks earlier at Tsavo. I saw a woman there, a German tourist, and she moved like a butch. A sexual tremor shook me. Jim saw that, saw the German butch eyeing me, picked it up, and stood grinning, sure of himself. “You liked that didn’t you?” But now he seems to have his antennae in, focused I will later understand on the bargaining he will do for the carvings. The hotel is seedy, and the day has gone overcast literally.

Then we drive off, stopping when we spot a carver in the crouch on the side of the road. Naturally, Jim is driving, and he pulls the Anglia over and gets out, 6 foot 2 and dressed in muslim prayer shirt and pants, all white. Jambo, bwana, he greets the carver, a man who looks about 60, and is slight, not tall I gather, though it is hard to tell exactly because he is in the crouch, dressed in khaki pants and shirt, head bent over the ebony, carving. Jambo, Mzee, the carver answers, though Jim should have Shika­muu-ed and called the carver Mzee, each a term of respect. I sort of sneakily creep from the car, and find a spot under an acacia tree a few feet from the carver, almost directly across from him. I am dressed in blue and yellow leso, my long thick black hair parted in the middle, pulled back and rolled into a knot. Jim stands and his eyes look narrower to me, rather mean. His skin is dry from the sun, and it is flaking a little around his lips, which are flaky white too, all chapped, and he is holding them in the little pursed way his mouth goes when he is about to whine. I still feel uncomfort­able from the seedy hotel, and I begin to think maybe it is we who are seedy, Jim, and me, for going along. Because when Jim begins to barter with the Mzee he is insultingly cheap, and I stay silent.

Makonde carvings are filled with beauty and pathos, with leaving and longing and holding and pushing, incredibly intricate, and made of ebony, so dark and lush and black. I have no idea of their actual worth, or what they sell for in import shops, but I know that Jim is offering somewhere in the area of only a few dollars. He becomes insistent, almost whiny, and I keep my eyes away from him. I look at the Mzee, carving, the ebony unfurling in strips and bits into the sandy earth beneath his bare feet. He says only Hipana, Mzee, No, sir. And Jim persists. I stay quiet. Some­how it ends, and we walk away with two carvings, which I carry to the car.

Years later, many years past my divorce from Jim, it is that moment I think of when I think about when I knew I had begun to despise my husband. Not him exactly, but all he was, all he stood for: whiteness. Its belief, implicit and unwavering, that it de­served. And when I knew I would not stay married. Naturally, other passions spurred the decision too, but that day marked the beginning.

The wood carvings sit on a small oak chest now, in my dining room way out in the country in upstate New York, where I have lived for a long time.

Chapter Two

Everything gets blurred by time, and takes on at last its own shape. Each time a memory evolves like this into something of its own, it’s like an icon in a field of personal icons, through which I can roam, a kind of troubadour wandering through what I recall as my life. If at times I sound romantic, or angry, solipsistic or lonely or lusty, that is probably the only truth of the memory. How it felt in the body and aligned with the mind, memory emerging like a ventriloquist, changing voices to get in character.

 

*

It is May 4, 1970, and I am driving home from work at Boston Children’s Hospital. With me in the car is David, a man I remem­ber only by his first name, and by his beard. He is white, and in his early twenties, tall, lean, and sweet, with soft brown eyes and a sad expression around his mouth, framed so gently by the brown full beard, which I love. I am still married, and it is just beginning to dawn on me that I am a lesbian, though it will not be until 1974 that I say that word in reference to myself. David is a C.O. and is doing his service at the hospital as an orderly. It is a beautiful day or it is raining, in which case I remember that as beautiful. We are listening to the radio, and chatting about work and the war and then the announcement: several students were shot today by the national guard during an antiwar demonstration that turned vio­lent.

Twenty-five years later I am similarly riding in a car, although alone and on my way to teach 7th graders in Oswego, NY, to write poetry. It is the anniversary of the Kent State killings, and Na­tional Public Radio talks about it most of the day, interviewing people who were there, playing sound clips from the day itself. I begin to tremble, driving, overcome by such sadness, and a deep deep feeling of disappointment. I will talk about Kent State with the 7th graders, who understand nothing about which I talk, or how moved and saddened I am, and for weeks, I will be sub­merged in a feeling of grief, loss, a troubadour without a song, without a rhythm or lyric, without the community to sing it to.

But then, of course, things were quite different. We had a community, those of us who worked against the war, those who had marched to Selma, those with whom we tripped and wrote pamphlets and rioted, in Cambridge and Amsterdam, in New York and northern New Jersey, where once, handing out a leaflet protesting the invasion of Cambodia, a white guy in a Chevy Bel-Air tried to run us down in his idea of patriotic zeal, and although I did not go to the Chicago convention in ’68, I knew lots of folks who did, and who talked about the rioting there with the same almost reverent disbelief with which David and I now sat in my car, a sharp little silver Mustang fast back with a four on the floor and a radio reverberator, echoing the news of the killings. I re­member that we both felt uncomfortable, somehow, and strangely a little ashamed. And I don’t recall ever seeing David again after that car ride home.

There’s an icon that’s planted in the field of everyone over 40 now, alongside the faces of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcom X, the Kennedys, Charles Manson, and Richard Speck. A kind of grave­yard for beginnings as well as the end: the run away girl holding a flower, as though she knew, somehow, that she was going to be visiting a graveyard, wracked with sobs of grief. When I get to the apartment, Jim is ironing a shirt, drinking a beer, and listening to the Doors. He has not yet heard the news. I tell him, and we turn on the tv, and Jim begins calling people. Later, we will meet and protest and riot and drop acid or mescaline and strategize. We believed in that in those days, and in some innocent way that seems almost completely unfathomable to me today, we believed in each other.

That is a big reason why I married Jim, after all. I believed in him, in his blondeness and whiteness, in his intelligence and physical power, in his ability to cry and laugh and shout, and in his mother and father, who were stable and nice, and who loved me. In my house, my father, Frankie, had been a terror, given to violent outbursts or long silent lurking periods, alternating with wild buying sprees, with gigs where he sang Sinatra tunes in seedy little lounges in North Jersey and often took us along, and where we’d fall asleep at tables or in the car. He’d plan trips that sounded fantastic and never happened, or that happened in some crusty, awful version—run down hotels well off the board walk in Atlantic City, or endless drives to Sussex County in New Jersey, far from Paterson where we lived, and where we knew no one. He scared me or he disappointed me, though the disappointment didn’t begin until I was almost a teenager. I imagined all Italian men like him, so I made a pact with myself never to date Italian boys, though they were the coolest looking, the best dressed, the most fun.

I started going out with Jim in high school, and he and his fam­ily were comforting. They were so normal, and calm and Ameri­can. I was recoiling from anything “too” Italian, which I associated with pathos and passion and violence. Jim Cooper and his family were nothing like that. Another icon: the happy family years, when we sat around playing scrabble or mahjong and drank sweet sweet coffee and decorated the Christmas tree all together, and without a single explosive fight.

 

 

Chapter Three

Now

I am like my mother, I am like my father. I am warm and funny and easy to like. I am moody and brooding and deeply suspicious. I have the nose of my mother’s side, the jutting nose with what everyone on her side calls the Martini bump in the middle. I have the eyes of the Vitale’s, hot and intense and sometimes furtive. I am Calabrian like the Martini’s, peasants and farmers and stub­born with life. I am Sicilian like the Vitale’s, peasants and farmers and angry with life. I work hard. I am lazy, I am a dreamer. I love solitude. I am lonely and long for a yelling crowd of family to sit at my table each night. I love to cook, to fill the house with sauce and meatballs and beer and wine. I love the smell of cigars, the idea of poker games all night around a smoky table, with the kids sleeping everywhere in the small houses we lived in, three kids to a bed, kids on the couch, on blankets on the floor. I love the argu­ments that jumped around the game. I hate discord and want only silence. I live alone. I want family. I love independence. I long for someone to be waiting for me. I am a lesbian. I was married to a man for twelve years. I have no children. I am a notmother, a malafemmina. I simmer with dreams and frustrations and rage and joy. Malafemmina. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry. I am tired. I bristle with energy. I want to sleep. I wake at 3 a.m. night after night and rise and worry and cry. I wake at 3 a.m. full of en­ergy, rushing to my desk to write a poem, a story, to get it down, to remember the ways that are dying. They live in me, always. I hate them. I love them. I shape them with words, with clay, with color. My mind dances, I do the tarantella all night long. My mind rages, I storm and fume and get lost in its fury. I make a world of books and artists and poems and confusion and freedom. I crave the world of family and rules and values that have lived for centu­ries. I want money and cd players and good clothes, I love to dress and look flashy and hot. I avoid money, its taint, the way it drives everyone away from their dreams. My dreams. My dreams are lately of going away, of staying home. Of making home out of words and clay and color and love. When I dream of going away I see only the sea, a harsh and gray rocking sea. A calm and blue and soothing sea. I want language. I want the words in Italian, in Sicilian, in Calabrian, in English, in poems. I dream in Italian, messages I understand only in my sleep. Pigeons fly in and out of my head. Homing pigeons. Gray and simple like my mother. In­tent, focused, mad like my father. This is what I am like, now, at mid-life.

 

*

This is what I do to pay my bills: I teach creative writing at a community college in upstate New York, not far from Syracuse, in Marshall, a small town, a village it’s called, which I like, because it reminds me of a community, like the village I lived in in Kenya over twenty years ago. I am a villager now, I belong someplace, my face is known at the library and the post office. I am on a first name basis with the postal workers and the library staff and I have my own mechanic, who does me special favors—reminding me to get my car inspected, even calling me at home on a Sunday to re­mind me to bring it in. In the twenty plus years I have lived here, I have been surrounded by community, at first the women’s com­munity that sprang up in the mid-seventies, a bunch of mostly dykes together for arts workshops that lasted for almost ten years. And then one by one, women left, for more cosmopolitan places, or to earn money, or to return to the comforts of heterosexuality, or to become mainstream lesbians, with babies and non-musical CDs, and now just a few of us remain, old hippies really, rene­gades still. Not a one of the six or seven who remain have a regu­lar job, only a few of us have health insurance, we are mostly sin­gle—an unexpected bit of reality—and we cling fast to our memories, and in a way, to one another. But the old way of having a community seems to have vanished. Now it is functional and distantly familial, but without spirit, without a direction. There used to be direction, or so we imagined or pretended. And we called that community.

Besides teaching at the community college, I teach children to write poems in the public schools. I teach convicts to write poems in a forensic psychiatric hospital nearby. I am the poetry lady, the magician, the zealot. At schools, little children follow me around, they love me. I avoid teachers’ rooms, where mostly white teach­ers sit and complain about blacks and gays, and the loss of what every bigot nowadays calls family values. This is true especially from the middle schools up; the elementary teachers are a whole different breed—usually warm and friendly and compassionate. Of course, they are almost all women.

I see children all full of sorrow and hope. After I leave schools, they send me letters and poems. “Life is like a nut,” a 4th grade boy writes, “You live for a while / and then you get cracked.” “I’m as lonely,” a black prisoner with no front teeth writes, “as an usher in a movie theater / as the rain in spring.” Images of loss and loneliness and isolation fill everyone’s poems. “Death,” writes a college student, “follows me around / like a dream.”

Is it me? I wonder. Or is everyone feeling a little like those oil­birds created out the Persian Gulf War, like the soldiers afflicted and dying from chemicals making oilbirds out of them too, a new species, created out of war, created to end. Like a metaphor. I think everyone is wearing loss on their sleeves instead of their hearts, and it makes them sad, or angry, or confused. “My heart,” writes a 5th grade girl named Lori, “has a dark side / full of shad­ows / no path to the right / danger to the left.” Oh Yes, I think when I read that. That’s how we all feel.

I drive fifty miles from my home in Marshall to the hospital for the criminally insane. I never drive there without thinking about Etheridge Knight’s poem, “Hardrock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.” I see the prison hospital from a few miles away, several minutes before I drive up the winding entrance road. It sits on a flat expanse of brown land, barbed wire fences surrounding it. I have an ID card, which identifies me: Jude Vitale, it says, Poet-in-Residence, Temple County Psychiatric Center. The picture on my card is wild-eyed: I grinned madly into the camera, opening my eyes wide. I look like an inmate, which pleases me. I am grinning with craziness, grinning to the voices of pigeons cooing or squawking, the voices I always hear in my head.

The officer at the first check-in sits alone in his little booth, reading “True Adventure,” and smoking a cigarette. He recog­nizes me and waves me through without checking my ID. I’m buzzed through the second locked gate. Inside, I pass through the metal detector. At the last check point, Officer Brinker goes through everything in my black canvas tote bag. “Bags within bags,” she chides me, pawing through them with very white hands covered with light orange freckles. “You have illegal things.” She manages to say this in a lascivious tone, looking up at me through pale blue eyes, letting the lids drop a little. For a mo­ment my heart leaps, and I am afraid she has found a joint. She has not. She searches my pencil case with the rainbow on it, and she rummages though my make up bag holding tweezers and nail clippers. These are definitely contraband. “I’ll keep this at the desk. You can pick it up on your way out.” She is an old-school dyke, pure butch, and I love her mannerisms, her style, still the duck tail, now silvery gray, the men’s pants, even the gun around her solid waist.

Nearby, two male guards trade Desert Shield and Desert Storm pins. One, a short, chubby white man with a pot belly, has a whole collection, wrapped in purple felt, which he unfurls on the check-in counter. The other, a tall white man with a light brown mus­tache, pushes his N.Y. Yankees baseball cap back on his head and oohs and ahhs in delight. “I’m a collector,” he announces proudly. “I want them all, one from each of the Armed Forces. Navy Desert Shield. Army Desert Shield. Air Force Desert Shield. Marine Des­ert Shield. ‘90 and ‘91. I almost got my buddy convinced to give me his Army Desert Shield `90. He just has it, you know, he’s not a collector. I collect. For the future. You know?”

 “Me, too,” the short guy says, nodding wisely. “And look,” he points to his collection, glistening under the prison’s fluorescent lights, nestled in purple felt. “Aren’t they beauty-ful? I’m hooked on these things, I can’t stop buying them.”

The night before, in the village video store, I listened to a thirtyish mother. “I reserved Patton for my husband, where is it? And Top Gun for my kids.” The video store clerk couldn’t find the reservation on the computer. The woman’s son, who looked seven or eight, said, “I told ya, Mom.” He wore a baseball cap covered with Desert Storm and Desert Shield pins. The mother started to get mad. The clerk kept forgetting her account number, the mother was making her nervous. I was fascinated with the ex­change. War on everybody’s minds. War our common experience. Flags waved all over Marshall, all over all the little towns and all the cities. The mother was white and overweight and self right­eous with her war movie reservations. The boy was already cyni­cal, sure ahead of time that his wishes would be denied. The clerk put the movies on reserve for the next night. The mother took Air­borne and Apocalypse Now and marched out of the video store with her little war monger marching in step behind her.

At the psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, two grown men trade war pins. Officer Brinker lets me though at last, wink­ing at me.

Twenty-eight students show up for poetry workshop. Twenty-four are black or Latino and male. There are three white men with scraggly light brown beards, bad teeth, and tattoos on their upper arms. They are home made tattoos, made in prison with contra­band metal, like my tweezers, sharpened into points. One says, “Linda,” inside a crudely made heart. Another really does say, “Mother,” in shaky blue script. One has a distorted eagle flying on his biceps. There is one woman, a big, black city girl who loves poetry and writes about sex all the time.

The inmates look forward to poetry workshop. They get to smoke and have a coffee break with extra sugars and donuts, and they socialize a little. Once a couple of them showed me card tricks. Once, when I was dunking my donut in my coffee at break time, an Italian-American inmate who was doing time with his son, both in prison, and now at the Psych Center, yelled at me. “Jude,” he’d said, grinning, “stop dunkin’. You’re gonna give Italians a bad name.”

Today, the inmates tell me I’m beautiful, they admire my tie-dye shirt. When I read poems to them they clap, like an audience. Today I have brought, on request, copies of “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. They love it. They are full of the ifs and if onlys of their lives. One inmate signs his poems, “Ralph the Pilot Emerson, aka Charlie Rodriguez.” He writes about flying, flying like a bird over the earth, his wings glistening like rubies in flight.

If I could fly I might never stop flying, big steely wings out over ocean or field, purple at twilight, waves glistening as far as my eyes could see. Sometimes lately I have the same dream, over and over again: I am flying, and it is nighttime. I am a big strong bird, completely black. My wings are like Chinese kites, or rather my wings are part of myself as a kite that is a bird, flying. My wings get tired, and I am a lonely bird. No matter how weary my wings get, and they get so weary that tears come from my eyes, I can’t stop flying, because I can’t fold my wings in. Coasting, re­lentlessly, sort of the way I imagined Limbo as a serious little southern Italian Catholic girl.

Sometimes at the prison workshop, I feel part of a community. sometimes it is the most comfortable I feel, anywhere. Locked up with a bunch of felons and having a real good time.

 

*

I live alone now. I rarely want to leave the house. It’s a little house, a house made for women. The ceilings are a bit on the low side, and it is cozy. I have not had a lover for four years and I am lonely for the company of one who is lover. I love the silence of living alone, the lack of disturbance emotion brings. Naturally, that is also what I miss the most.

In kindergarten I went to school, proud as a flower, my mother smiling up at me from the bottom of the stone steps. I didn’t want to leave my mother, but I did. I sat in the front row with the be­ginnings of a headache, scratchy in a little plaid dress and already restless. Then the teacher walked in, a blonde and beautiful teacher. I swooned. I felt good. I was dazzled. I was in love. My mother loves to tell the story of my first day: “When she came out of school, she was all excited and proud of herself, and her coat was buttoned all lopsided.”

 

*

In the lopsided red framed mirror, I watch my face change. Lines around my mouth, the beginnings of the same jowly-cheekedness of my mother. Sometimes I measure time this way. Sometimes I count up the years I’ve lived in this house, or the age of my three cats, or by the date of my last published book. Often, I lay on my bed and watch the trees change and know time is passing.