The Best American Essays 2013 Read online

  Early on, blessed with an ear for the variations of spoken English, I realized that I lived in four linguistic worlds. In my house we spoke standard, grammatically correct American English, all our be’s and have’s in the right place. Outside my house on Carpenter Avenue in the Northeast Bronx, where I spent my time when I returned from Fieldston in the West Bronx, the guys spoke working-class New York English tinged with many Italianisms. Like they would say “close delight.” At school we spoke standard American English with an emphasis on long French-rooted words and slight Yiddish intonations. On weekends when my father took me to Harlem I found a broad spectrum of speech generally tied to skin color, though dark-skinned men like Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes might speak in an international English, British consonants and American vowels. Ethel Waters rolled her r’s. My dentist, Dr. Bessie Delany, spoke standard with a southern accent. Sometimes poorly educated light-skinned folks would speak Africamerican vernacular (Ebonics) as well as did dark brown people. I couldn’t speak it then, but I loved listening to it and recognized its expressiveness.

  The Negroes who spoke this Africamerican Creole seemed to catch hell. Nobody in my immediate family spoke it, so we didn’t catch hell, we just had no money. Only my aunt Iris, a native of British Guiana, didn’t sound American. Nana Jessie and her sister, my great-aunt Charlotte (who passed for Euro in her business life and some of her private life), both sounded like the elderly Savannah society women I heard one time on TV. My father had worked hard to eradicate all vestiges of Negroness from his voice. He sounded like a radio announcer, and sometimes his brown skin would surprise people who had first encountered him on the phone.

  In 1947 they let Jackie Robinson play in the major leagues. I had never seen my father more excited about anything. That summer my father took me to Ebbets Field to see Robinson. Along with the many brown-skinned people in the stands, we cheered his every move. Just about every Negro in America became a Dodger fan. Still, having been raised in the Bronx, I remained a Yankee fan even when they met Brooklyn in the World Series.

  Since I couldn’t mess with Miss Cholly, I realized that if I wanted to date, I would have to find some brown-skinned girls. My integration into the broader Africamerican society had begun.

  Southeast of where I lived in the Bronx with my Italo friends, a Negro neighborhood had developed. As a baby I had actually lived in this new ’hood before the end of the Depression drove my father, my mother, and me to Carpenter Avenue, where widowed Nana Jesse lived with her brother Joe, who would sneak off to New Jersey to spend time with his dead wife’s Irish relatives.

  Though my mother had baptized me Catholic, I decided to attend the Sunday school at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church—for the girls. So for the first time in my life, except for trips to Harlem, I found myself surrounded by Negroes.

  I did not assimilate into Negro society immediately, and in some ways, though I have lived exclusively with brown-skinned people since November 1968, I have never completely assimilated. The standard American speech coming out of my brown face made my Africamerican contemporaries uneasy, though their parents liked the way I spoke. After a while I met other private-school Negritos who spoke standard like me. Not quite the same: their accents sounded more middle-class and southern than my own, which had a working-class Italo tinge, kind of like Frank Sinatra, whose singing and manner I continued to revere.

  Further, I had never learned how to dance properly. At Fieldston I always danced better than my Euro classmates. In any group of Negroes, I danced like an animated man of tin, or like the esteemed President Obama. I confounded the one-drop rule. If one drop made me 100 percent Negro, then why hadn’t my seven-sixteenths African blood taught me to dance? (Years later I learned that slave owners had used the one-drop rule to preclude their enslaved sons and daughters from claiming inheritance of property or land. Mr. Cholly gave us race to talk about so we wouldn’t talk about the money.)

  And another thing: I didn’t know the music. I hadn’t heard “Earth Angel,” “One Mint Julep,” or “In the Still of the Night.” I knew Sinatra, Vic Damone, Frankie Laine, and Bing Crosby. I did know the Ink Spots and a little Armstrong (only as a singer) and some Nat King Cole (as singer and pianist), but no rhythm and blues, and no blues at all. The first time I heard Muddy Waters, his ferocity frightened me. Creoles traditionally did not relate to the blues.

  Also, I didn’t know the food. Fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, candied yams with marshmallows, and mulatto rice all seemed exotic to me. Nana Jessie had never learned to cook that well. She usually scorched the rice. Her mother had trained her as a seamstress. After her husband, Narciso Garcia, died, she worked in sweatshops and in freelance as the breadwinner and left the cooking to her mother, Josephine Bartow Marin, who had come north to help her. My mother had learned to cook at Evander Childs High School in a home economics class, standard American stuff. My father cooked well, but only breakfast food and roasting. As a teenager he had worked on the railroad and greatly admired the Pullman cooks and porters for their cuisine and exquisite manners. He always made perfect pancakes, never scorched, one side just as golden as the other.

  In the summer of 1952 my father took me to Tennessee to visit his birthplace and where he had grown up. He never said as much, but I think he wanted me to see the segregated South. However, in planning the trip he used a very informative guidebook produced by the National Urban League that told the brown-skinned traveler exactly where to stop and to stay and so avoid rejection and embarrassment. Thus I saw only the Africamerican South—sandwich shops and motels, colleges and universities, and the spacious houses of my uncles. I loved the South I saw. The brown-skinned girls had fabulous legs because they walked a lot. Their twangy voices made me swoon.

  When I encountered my first COLORED water fountain, on Lookout Mountain, in Georgia, to my private-school mind it seemed absurd, two fountains to dispense the same water. What did Euros want to demonstrate? Did they fear they would contract Negroness? Yet, though nobody watched us, we did not drink from the WHITES ONLY fountain.

  Only in southern Illinois did we meet segregation face to face, in the year Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, ran for president. A woman barred us entry to a coffee shop. “I’m sorry, but we don’t serve coloreds here.” My father sputtered, angry but mostly bewildered. I wondered why she said “I’m sorry.” Land of Lincoln.

  Then in summer 1955 came the murder of Emmett Till. Damn.

  His courageous mother made us look at his battered, bloated face. See what you’ve done to my boy. I saw myself in Emmett Till, an outgoing and adventurous fourteen-year-old from Chicago who considered racism and segregation a crazy joke, who was accustomed to talking boldly to anybody, even to some policemen, not realizing the COLORED and WHITE signs really meant something, complimenting a pretty girl I did not know, like in Chicago and New York. Hey baby, Emmett Till said to Miss Carolyn. Hey baby.

  The murder of light-skinned Emmett Till made me feel like a real Negro. Your skin shade, your manners, your voice didn’t matter. Say the wrong thing to the wrong Euro and you’d end up brutalized, beaten, hanged, shot, drowned, killed, dead. Underneath it all, Euros hated us and thought nothing of killing us. I became aware of other indignities—somebody giving Dr. Ralph Bunche some grief, Miles Davis getting beat up by police for standing in front of his workplace, Birdland.

  After Emmett Till, living the life of a Negro became a serious business. For the first time I began to feel an emotion that had probably dogged my father and his father, born in bondage in 1858, the son of his owner, nineteen years old when the federal government betrayed the freedmen and we lost our American Dream of forty acres and a mule and a chance at true economic equality. Dread. Dread came into my life, and futility. Don’t matter what you do and don’t matter what you say,/If Mr. Cholly feel he want it, he can take all your shit away.

  Dread and the unpredictability of violence. Euros could turn on you in an instant, even after years of kindness an
d affection. If your friends’ parents didn’t alert the doorman to your arrival, you would have to go around to the service entrance. When it came time to dis-integrate you from the party, you didn’t get an invitation and nobody objected. They all went. You stood outside looking in. When some Euro wanted to beat you or even kill you, nobody did anything to stop him. They might arrest somebody for it, but he would get off.

  Euros lived in a democracy; Africamericans lived in a police state. But most Euros didn’t see the contradiction. By then we had finally studied the Constitution, and nobody seemed bothered by the way its high moral rhetoric contrasted with the loopholes some Founding Fathers had created to keep Africans in chains. Euros had accepted and justified slavery among the Greeks and Romans—something about the price of a Great Civilization. Suitably Jeffersonian.

  In September 1956 I went away to Harvard, hoping that in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge, Massachusetts, race and racism would evaporate. For the first few months it seemed it had, though a teacher in whose class I did poorly seemed to resent me personally for squandering the great opportunity that the college had bestowed on me.

  When it came time for the Harvard-Yale game, I got into the spirit of the great event and invited my brown-skinned girlfriend up from New York. Sometime in October I phoned the big hotel up near Radcliffe and made her a reservation for the weekend. The man who took the reservation assured me that I had done all I needed to do to secure it; I didn’t have to put down a deposit or anything. “Just show up on Friday night, sir, and you’ll find the young lady’s room ready for her.”

  My girlfriend came up on the train and I went to Back Bay Station to meet her. We stopped in Harvard Yard, where all freshmen lived, and had a drink with my roommates. Around eight o’clock we walked up Mass Ave to the big hotel, finding the lobby jammed with arriving young ladies and their dates. We struggled through the crowd and reached the front desk, told the avuncular desk clerk that we had a reservation under the name of William Kelley for Avis Brown. He went away for a minute, then returned and, in the politest way, apologized and told us that the hotel had misplaced our reservation and by now all the rooms were gone. Disappointed but accepting the clerk at his word, we left the big hotel. We returned to my room in Holworthy Hall and made phone calls and found my girlfriend a place to stay in a Boston suburb. Of course this disrupted our other plans—it took so long to get to Cambridge and back that we never got to see the game.

  I forgot the incident and for decades never questioned that a mix-up had occurred. Some twenty years later, after I’d made a daring escape to the island nation of Jamaica and lived for several years in a mostly brown-skinned country, I found myself sitting on our small verandah watching my two golden-brown daughters playing with nannybugs in the dirt. My thoughts drifted back to November 1956. The Harvard-Yale game that I never got to see. Fog dissolving from my memory, I realized, and exclaimed aloud, “Holy spaghetti! On the phone they thought I was Frank Sinatra!”

  MAKO YOSHIKAWA

  My Father’s Women

  FROM The Missouri Review

  WHEN I DROVE my sisters back to town from the lawyer’s three days after our father’s death, it took a while for us to arrive at the subject of his women. The lawyer had given us a rundown on the will—no surprises, 20 percent to each of us, a little more to his final companion and a little less to his two stepdaughters from his second marriage. We knew that his estate, which included a parking lot in a commercial district in Tokyo as well as a summer house near Mount Fuji, was considerable. Yet none of us had any idea where the right documents were, and for some time our conversation shuttled from where to look for them to what kind of service to hold to how to clear the house of its clutter to when to see the body and how best to lay it to rest.

  At last we grew quiet. We were tired, still jolted from the call that had yanked us from our lives.

  My older sister broke the silence. “Out of all those girlfriends and wives,” she said, “out of all the women he had, who did he love the most?”

  I glanced at her. Overcome by the shock, she had cried at the lawyer’s, but she looked composed enough now.

  My younger sister said Ellie, hands down. His second wife, the love of his middle age, his partner in bowling and church dinners. She reminded us of the episode he’d had after her death and the long hospitalization that had followed. “That was a bad one, even for him.”

  I shook my head. “That was just because her death was so unexpected. Don’t you remember how they used to fight about God?”

  Rousing herself, my older sister nodded. “He’d point out all the places the Bible contradicted itself.”

  “And all the ways God was a logical impossibility.”

  “She’d get so mad she couldn’t speak.”

  “Besides,” I said, “since when did any of his episodes occur for a reason?” It was obvious: he was happiest with Toshiko-san, his last companion. So what if she hadn’t gone to college? Our father, Shoichi Yoshikawa, had been a Princeton University physicist and a world leader in fusion energy research. None of his women—a category that included us, Ivy League graduates all—had understood physics on his level; very few did. Toshiko-san had made him laugh, no mean feat, and they had had Japan, not to mention Japanese food and the Japanese language, in common.

  “But if he loved her so much,” my younger sister shot back, “why didn’t he marry her?”

  To which I had no answer.

  It was November 2010. We were in our late thirties and forties, and although we had taken our time about it, we were all finally settled or married, one sister with a nine-year-old, the other pregnant. We had grown up in Princeton and had left it as soon as we could, the two of them hightailing it to California. I had stayed in the Northeast, but in the last two decades I had seen our father almost as seldom as they, my neglect rendered more glaring by my proximity and the fact that I, a childless novelist and professor, had more time to spare.

  Systematically we went down the list of the women who’d passed through Shoichi’s life: girlfriends whose names we could barely recall, drinking partners, one or two con women who were after his bank account or citizenship papers or simply the cash in his wallet. But we dismissed those as infatuations. Of course none of us suggested his first wife, our mother.

  My older sister had fallen silent, her eyes fastened on the landscape, at once familiar and strange, whipping by outside the window.

  I pulled to a stop at a traffic light. “You okay?”

  Her head still averted, she said, “Do you ever wonder—”

  Her voice was husky. Our father had been seventy-six. He had a heart condition, but when he last saw us—we had all seen him, though at different times, in the spring—he’d assured us it was under control.

  She cleared her throat. “Do you think it’s possible that he never loved any of them?”

  Behind us my younger sister released a breath. I gazed ahead. The sky was overcast, but the trees along the road were rinsed with fall color.

  Then the light changed to green and I pressed on the accelerator, and my older sister turned from the window and asked where we should stop for lunch.

  He was born in Tokyo, the scion of a wealthy family descended from samurai. The only son, he was cheeky, cheerful, and unusually smart, and his parents, sister, nursemaids, and tutors doted on him. On his fifth birthday his mother died of pneumonia; two years later World War II began. His father, who was well educated but impractical, did not know how to supplement their rations, and during the war years Shoichi suffered, his stomach swelling with malnutrition.

  With the end of the war his life resumed its rightful course. He acquired a stepmother, a Juilliard-trained pianist who cherished him, and later two half siblings who looked up to him. He became interested in stamps, and at the age of eleven began traveling across Japan on his own to find and collect them.

  He was a handsome boy, tall and skinny with an oversized head topped by a thick brush
of hair. He had large, dark eyes and a searching, restless gaze; his grin was bright and sudden and took up his whole face. He received the highest marks in the country on the national exam to enter Tokyo University; while there he won awards, acclaim, and finally a fellowship to MIT. When he decided to take it, articles, one or two in Japan’s biggest newspapers, deplored the “brain drain” that was taking a mind such as his to America. He completed his doctorate in three years and in 1961, at the age of twenty-seven, began working at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory.

  At PPL, a hive of physicists, engineers, and technicians worked to create an energy source that was clean, limitless, and safe. Their plan was to use nuclear fusion: they would merge the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms into a single nucleus, as the sun does, and the stars. The new nucleus would be smaller than the original two, and the difference in the mass would convert into energy. Shoichi accepted their offer and stayed at the lab for forty years.

  My sisters and I held his memorial service in a small room at the local Hyatt. We had looked into using the university chapel, with its stained-glass windows and soaring ceilings, and had been secretly relieved to find that it was booked for holiday festivities through December. The chapel, which seats two thousand, would have echoed even more than usual with only a handful of mourners in attendance.

  In the end more than fifty people came, so many that we almost didn’t have enough chairs. Most of them were world-class scientists, three Nobel Prize winners in their midst. My mother’s old gang was there, as well as Ellie’s family, some former neighbors, and a few friends Shoichi had acquired since retirement—quiet men, shy and perhaps lonely, whom he had met through MIT’s alumni association. It was the turnout from the lab, which numbered more than two dozen, that had thrown off our count.