Читать книгу Brothers and Keepers - John Edgar Wideman - Страница 10

VISITS

When I was a very little child, oh, about six or seven, I had a habit of walking down Walnut and Copeland streets; you know those streets. As I walked I would look at the cars and in my mind I would buy them, but they only cost nickels or dimes. Big ones a dime, little ones a nickel, some that I liked a whole lot would cost a quarter. So as I got older this became a habit. For years I bought cars with the change that was in my pocket, which in those times wasn’t very much.

Now this was a kind of wish, but more than that it was a way of looking at things—an unrealistic way—it’s like I wanted things to be easy, and misguidedly tried to make everything that way, blinded then to the fact that nothing good or worthwhile comes without serious effort. What I’m trying to say is that while I was walking through life I had a distorted view of how I wanted things to be rather than how they really were or are. Always wanted things to be easy; so instead of dealing with things as they were, I didn’t deal with them at all. I ducked hard things that took effort or work and tried to have fun, make a party, cause that was always easy.

I heard the news first in a phone call from my mother. My youngest brother, Robby, and two of his friends had killed a man during a holdup. Robby was a fugitive, wanted for armed robbery and murder. The police were hunting him, and his crime had given the cops license to kill. The distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine suddenly collapsed. The two thousand miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my years of willed ignorance, of flight and hiding, had not changed a simple truth: I could never run fast enough or far enough. Robby was inside me. Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him.

Nearly three months would pass between the day in November 1975 when I learned of my brother’s crime and the February afternoon he appeared in Laramie. During that period no one in the family knew Robby’s whereabouts. After the initial reaction of shock and disbelief subsided, people in Pittsburgh had settled into the inevitability of a long, tense wait. Prayers were said. As word passed along the network of family and friends, my people, who had long experience of waiting and praying, braced themselves for the next blow. A special watch was set upon those, like my mother, who would be hardest hit. The best was hoped for, but the worst expected; and no one could claim to know what the best might be. No news was good news. No news meant Robby hadn’t been apprehended, that whatever else he’d lost, he still was free. But knowing nothing had its dark side, created a concern that sometimes caused my mother, in spite of herself, to pray for Robby’s capture. Prison seemed safer than the streets. As long as he was free, there was a chance Robby could hurt someone or be killed. For my mother and the others who loved him, the price of my brother’s freedom was a constant, gnawing fear that anytime the phone rang or a bulletin flashed across the TV screen, the villain, the victim might be Robert Wideman.

Because I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, I could shake loose from the sense of urgency, of impending disaster dogging my people in Pittsburgh. Never a question of forgetting Robby, more a matter of how I remembered him that distinguished my feelings from theirs. Sudden flashes of fear, rage, and remorse could spoil a class or a party, cause me to retreat into silence, lose whole days to gloominess and distance. But I had the luxury of dealing intermittently with my pain. As winter deepened and snow filled the mountains, I experienced a comforting certainty. The worst wouldn’t happen. Robby wouldn’t be cut down in a wild cops-and-robbers shootout, because I knew he was on his way to find me. Somehow, in spite of everything, we were going to get together. I was waiting for him to arrive. I knew he would. And this certainty guaranteed his safety.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking, a whistling away of the miles and years of silence between us, but I never doubted a reunion would occur.

On a Sunday early in February, huge, wet flakes of snow were falling continuously past the windows of the house on Harney Street—the kind of snow not driven by wolf winds howling in from the north, but soft, quiet, relentless snow, spring snow almost benign in the unhurried way it buried the town. The scale of the storm, the immense quantities of snow it dumped minute after minute, forced me to remember that Laramie was just one more skimpy circle of wagons huddling against the wilderness. I had closed the curtains to shut out that snow which seemed as if it might never stop.

That Sunday I wrote to my brother. Not a letter exactly. I seldom wrote letters and had no intention of sticking what I was scribbling in an envelope. Mailing it was impossible anyway, since I had no idea where my brother might be. Really it was more a conversation than a letter. I needed to talk to someone, and that Sunday Robby seemed the perfect someone.

So I talked to him about what I’d learned since coming west. Filled him in on the news. Shared everything from the metaphysics of the weather to the frightening circumstances surrounding the premature birth of Jamila, our new daughter. I explained how winter’s outrageous harshness is less difficult to endure than its length. How after a tease of warm, springlike weather in late April the sight of a snowflake in May is enough to make a grown man cry. How Laramie old-timers brag about having seen snow fall every month of the year. How I’d almost killed my whole family on Interstate 80 near the summit of the Laramie range, at the beginning of our annual summer migration east to Maine, when I lost control of the Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser and it did a 360 on the icy road in the middle of June.

The letter rambled on and on for pages. Like good talk, it digressed and recycled itself and switched moods precipitously. Inevitably, one subject was home and family. After all, I was speaking to my brother. Whatever the new news happened to be, there was the old news, the deep roots of shared time and place and blood. When I touched on home, the distance between us melted. I could sense Robby’s presence, just over my shoulder, a sensation so real I was sure I could have reached out and touched him if I had lifted my eyes from the page and swiveled my chair.

Writing that Sunday, I had no reason to believe my brother was on his way to Laramie. No one had heard from him in months. Yet he was on his way and I knew it. Two men, hundreds of miles apart, communicating through some mysterious process neither understood but both employed for a few minutes one Sunday afternoon as efficiently, effectively as dolphins talking underwater with the beeps and echoes of their sonar. Except that the medium into which we launched our signals was thin air. Thin, high mountain air spangled with wet snowflakes.

I can’t explain how or why but it happened. Robby was in the study with me. He felt close because he was close, part of him outrunning the stolen car, outrunning the storm dogging him and his partners as they fled from Salt Lake City toward Laramie.

Reach out and touch. That’s what the old songs could do. I’d begun that Sunday by reading a week-old New York Times. One of the beauties of living in Laramie. No point in frantically striving to keep abreast of the Times. The race was over before the paper arrived in town, Thursday after the Sunday it was published. The Times was stale news, all its urgency vitiated by the fact that I could miss it when it was fresh and the essential outline of my world, my retreat into willed ignorance and a private, leisurely pace would continue unchanged.

Five minutes of the paper had been enough; then I repacked the sections into their plastic sheath, let its weight pull it off the couch onto the rug. Reach out and touch. Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, the Harmonizing Four, James Cleveland, the Davis Sisters, the Swan Silvertones. I dug out my favorite albums and lined them up against the stereo cabinet. A cut or two from each one would be my Sunday morning service. Deejaying the songs got me off my backside, forced me out of the chair where I’d been sitting staring at the ceiling. With good gospel tunes rocking the house I could open the curtains and face the snow. The sky was blue. Shafts of sunlight filtered through a deluge of white flakes. Snow, sunshine, blue sky, not a ripple of wind deflecting the heavy snow from its straight, downward path. An unlikely conjunction of elements perfectly harmonized. Like the pain and hope, despair and celebration of the black gospel music. Like the tiny body of the baby girl in her isolette, the minuscule, premature, two-pound-fourteen-ounce bundle of bone and sinew and nerve and will that had fought and continued to fight so desperately to live.

The songs had stirred me, flooded me with memories and sensations to the point of bursting. I had to talk to someone. Not anyone close, not anyone who had been living through what I’d been experiencing the past three years in the West. A stranger’s ear would be better than a friend’s, a stranger who wouldn’t interrupt with questions, with alternate versions of events. I needed to do most of the talking. I wanted a listener, an intimate stranger, and summoned up Robby; and he joined me. I wrote something like a letter to wherever my brother might be, to whomever Robby had become.

Wrote the letter and of course never sent it, but got an answer anyway in just two days, the following Tuesday toward the end of the afternoon. I can pinpoint the hour because I was fixing a drink. Cocktail time is as much a state of mind as a particular hour, but during the week five o’clock is when I usually pour a stiff drink for myself and one for my lady if she’s in the mood. At five on Tuesday, February 11, Robby phoned from a bowling alley down the street and around the corner to say he was in town.

Hey, Big Bruh.

Hey. How you doing? Where the hell are you?

We’re in town. At some bowling alley. Me and Michael Dukes and Johnny-Boy.

In Laramie?

Yeah. Think that’s where we’s at, anyway. In a bowling alley. Them nuts is bowling. Got to get them crazy dudes out here before they tear the man’s place up.

Well, youall c’mon over here. Which bowling alley is it?

Just a bowling alley. Got some Chinese restaurant beside it.

Laramie Lanes. It’s close to here. I can be there in a minute to get you.

Okay. That’s cool. We be in the car outside. Old raggedy-ass Oldsmobile got Utah plates. Hey, man. Is this gon be alright?

What do you mean?

You know. Coming by your house and all. I know you heard about the mess.

Mom called and told me. I’ve been waiting for you to show up. Something told me you were close. You wait. I’ll be right there.

*

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 15, 1975, approximately three months before arriving in Laramie, my youngest brother Robert (whom I had named), together with Michael Dukes and Cecil Rice, had robbed a fence. A rented truck allegedly loaded with brand-new Sony color TVs was the bait in a scam designed to catch the fence with a drawer full of money. The plan had seemed simple and foolproof. Dishonor among thieves. A closed circle, crooks stealing from crooks, with the law necessarily excluded. Except a man was killed. Dukes blew him away when the man reached for a gun Dukes believed he had concealed inside his jacket.

Stop. Stop, you stupid motherfucker.

But the fence broke and ran and kept running deaf and dumb to everything except the pounding of his heart, the burning in his lungs, as he dashed crouching like a halfback the fifty feet from the empty rental truck to an office at one corner of his used-car lot. He’d heard the gun pop and pop again as he stumbled and scrambled to his feet but he kept running, tearing open the fatal shoulder wound he wasn’t even aware of yet. Kept running and kept pumping blood and pumping his arms and legs past the plate-glass windows of the office, past a boundary of plastic banners strung above one edge of the lot, out into the street, into traffic, waving his arms to get someone to stop. He made it two blocks up Greys Pond Road, dripping a trail of blood, staggering, stumbling, weaving up the median strip between four lanes of cars. No one wanted anything to do with a guy drunk or crazy enough to be playing in the middle of a busy highway. Only when he pitched face first and lay crumpled on the curb did a motorist pull over and come to his aid.

Meanwhile, at the rear of the rental truck, a handful of money, coins, and wadded bills the dying man had flung down before he ran, lay on the asphalt between two groups of angry, frightened men. Black men. White men. No one in control. That little handful of chump change on the ground, not enough to buy two new Sonys at K Mart, a measure of the fence’s deception, proof of the game he intended to run on the black men, just as they’d planned their trick for him. There had to be more money somewhere, and somebody would have to pay for this mess, this bloody double double-cross; and the men stared across the money at each other too choked with rage and fear to speak.

By Tuesday when Robby called, the chinook wind that had melted Sunday’s snow no longer warmed and softened the air. “Chinook” means “snow-eater,” and in the high plains country—Laramie sits on a plateau seven thousand feet above sea level—wind and sun can gobble up a foot of fresh snow from the ground in a matter of hours. The chinook had brought spring for a day, but just as rapidly as it appeared, the mellow wind had swept away, drawing in its wake arctic breezes and thick low-lying clouds. The clouds which had darkened the sky above the row of tacky, temporary-looking storefronts at the dying end of Third Street where Laramie Lanes hunkered.

Hey, Big Bruh.

Years since we’d spoken on the phone, but I had recognized Robby’s voice immediately. He’d been with me when I was writing Sunday, so my brother’s voice was both a shock and no surprise at all.

Big Brother was not something Robby usually called me. But he’d chimed the words as if they went way back, as if they were a touchstone, a talisman, a tongue-in-cheek greeting we’d been exchanging for ages. The way Robby said “Big Bruh” didn’t sound phony, but it didn’t strike me as natural either. What I’d felt was regret, an instant, devastating sadness because the greeting possessed no magic. If there’d ever been a special language we shared, I’d forgotten it. Robby had been pretending. Making up a magic formula on the spot. Big Bruh. But that had been okay. I was grateful. Anything was better than dwelling on the sadness, the absence, better than allowing the distance between us to stretch further. . . .

On my way to the bowling alley I began to ask questions I hadn’t considered till the phone rang. I tried to anticipate what I’d see outside Laramie Lanes. Would I recognize anyone? Would they look like killers? What had caused them to kill? If they were killers, were they dangerous? Had crime changed my brother into someone I shouldn’t bring near my house? I recalled Robby and his friends playing records, loud talking, giggling and signifying in the living room of the house on Marchand Street in Pittsburgh. Rob’s buddies had names like Poochie, Dulamite, Hanky, and Bubba. Just kids messing around, but already secretive, suspicious of strangers. And I had been a stranger, a student, foreign to the rhythms of their lives, their talk as I sat, home from college, in the kitchen talking to Robby’s mother. I’d have to yell into the living room sometimes. Ask them to keep the noise down so I could hear myself think. If I walked through the room, they’d fall suddenly silent. Squirm and look at each other and avoid my eyes. Stare at their own hands and feet mute as little speak-no-evil monkeys. Any question might get at best a nod or grunt in reply. If five or six kids were hanging out in the little living room they made it seem dark. Do wop, do wop forty-fives on the record player, the boys’ silence and lowered eyes conjuring up night no matter what time of the day I passed through the room.

My father had called them thugs. Robby and his little thugs. The same word he’d used for me and my cut buddies when we were coming up, loafing around the house on Copeland Street, into playing records and bullshucking about girls, and saying nothing to nobody not part of our gang. Calling Rob’s friends thugs was my father’s private joke. Thugs not because they were incipient criminals or particularly bad kids, but because in their hip walks and stylized speech and caps pulled down on their foreheads they were declaring themselves on the lam, underground, in flight from the daylight world of nice, respectable adults.

My father liked to read the Sunday funnies. In the “Nancy” comic strip was a character named Sluggo, and I believe that’s who my father had in mind when he called them thugs. That self-proclaimed little tough guy, snub-nosed, bristle-haired, knuckleheaded Sluggo. Funny, because like Sluggo they were dead serious about the role they were playing. Dead serious and fooling nobody. So my father had relegated them to the funny papers.

Road grime caked the windows of the battered sedan parked outside the bowling alley. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. I let my motor run, talked to the ghost of my brother the way I’d talked that Sunday, waiting for a flesh-and-blood version to appear.

Robby was a fugitive. My little brother was wanted for murder. For three months Robby had been running and hiding from the police. Now he was in Laramie, on my doorstep. Robbery. Murder. Flight. I had pushed them out of my mind. I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on my brother’s predicament. I had been angry, hurt and afraid, but I’d had plenty of practice cutting myself off from those sorts of feelings. Denying disruptive emotions was a survival mechanism I’d been forced to learn early in life. Robby’s troubles could drive me crazy if I let them. It had been better to keep my feelings at a distance. Let the miles and years protect me. Robby was my brother, but that was once upon a time, in another country. My life was relatively comfortable, pleasant, safe. I’d come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn’t need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains.

In my Volvo, peering across the street, searching for a sign of life in the filthy car or the doorway of Laramie Lanes, pieces of my life rushed at me, as fleeting, as unpredictable as the clusters of cloud scudding across the darkening sky.

Rob. Hey, Rob. Do you remember the time we were living on the third floor of Grandma’s house on Copeland Street and we were playing and Daddy came scooting in from behind the curtain where he and Mommy slept, dropping a trail of farts, blip, blip, blip, and flew out the door and down the steps faster than anybody’d ever made it before? I don’t know what he was doing or what we were doing before he came farting through the room, but I do remember the stunned silence afterward, the five of us kids looking at one another like we’d seen the Lone Ranger and wondering what the hell was that. Was that really Daddy? Were those sounds actual blipping farts from the actual behind of our actual father? Well, we sat on the floor, staring at each other, a couple seconds; then Tish laughed or I laughed. Somebody had to start it. A choked-back, closed-mouth, almost-swallowed, one-syllable laugh. And then another and another. As irresistible then as the farts blipping in a train from Daddy’s pursed behind. The first laugh sneaks out then it’s all hell bursting loose, it’s one pop after another, and mize well let it all hang out. We crack up and start to dance. Each one of us takes a turn being Edgar Wideman, big daddy, scooting like he did across the floor, fast but sneakylike till the first blip escapes and blows him into overdrive. Bip. Blap. Bippidy-bip. And every change and permutation of fart we can manufacture with our mouths, or our wet lips on the back of our hands, or a hand cupped in armpit with elbow pumping. A Babel of squeaky farts and bass farts and treble and juicy and atom-bomb and trip-hammer, machine-gun, suede, firecracker, slithery, bubble-gum-cracking, knuckle-popping, gone-with-the-wind menagerie of every kind of fart we can imagine. Till Mommy pokes her head from behind the curtain and says, That’s enough youall. But she can’t help grinning her ownself cause she had to hear it too. Daddy trailing that wedding-car tin-can tail of farts and skidding down the steps to the bathroom on the second floor where he slammed the door behind himself before the door on the third floor had time to swing shut. Mom’s smiling so we sputter one last fusillade and grin and giggle at each other one more time while she says again, That’s enough now, that’s enough youall.

*

Robby crossed Third Street alone, leaving his friends behind in the muddy car. I remember how glad I was to see him. How ordinary it seemed to be meeting him in this place he’d never been before. Here was my brother miraculously appearing from God-knows-where, a slim, bedraggled figure, looking very much like a man who’s been on the road for days, nothing like an outlaw or killer, my brother striding across the street to greet me. What was alien, unreal was not the man but the town, the circumstances that had brought him to this juncture. By the time Robby had reached my car and leaned down smiling into the open window, Laramie, robbery, murder, flight, my litany of misgivings had all disappeared.

Rob rode with me from the bowling alley to the Harney Street house. Dukes and Johnny-Boy followed in the Olds. Rob told me Cecil Rice had split back to Pittsburgh to face the music. Johnny-Boy was somebody Robby and Mike had picked up in Utah.

Robby and his two companions stayed overnight. There was eating, drinking, a lot of talk. Next day I taught my classes at the university and before I returned home in the afternoon, Robby and his crew had headed for Denver. My brother’s last free night was spent in Laramie, Wyoming. February 11, 1976, the day following their visit, Robby, Mike, and Johnny were arrested in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Oldsmobile they’d been driving had stolen plates. Car they’d borrowed in Utah turned out to be stolen too, bringing the FBI into the case because the vehicle and plates had been transported across state lines. The Colorado cops didn’t know the size of the fish in their net until they checked the FBI wire and suddenly realized they had some “bad dudes” in their lockup. “Niggers wanted for Murder One back East” was how one detective described the captives to a group of curious bystanders later, when Robby and Michael were being led, manacled, draped with chains, through the gleaming corridor of a Colorado courthouse.

I can recall only a few details about Robby’s last night of freedom. Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. Nobody as hungry as I thought they should be. Michael narrating a tale about a basketball scholarship he won to NYU, his homesickness, his ambivalence about the Apple, a coach he didn’t like whose name he couldn’t remember.

Johnny-Boy wasn’t from Pittsburgh. Small, dark, greasy, he was an outsider who knew he didn’t fit, ill at ease in a middle-class house, the meandering conversations that had nothing to do with anyplace he’d been, anything he understood or cared to learn. Johnny-Boy had trouble talking, trouble staying awake. When he spoke at all, he stuttered riffs of barely comprehensible ghetto slang. While the rest of us were talking, he’d nod off. I didn’t like the way his heavy-lidded, bubble eyes blinked open and searched the room when he thought no one was watching him. Perhaps sleeping with one eye open was a habit forced upon him by the violent circumstances of his life, but what I saw when he peered from “sleep,” taking the measure of his surroundings, of my wife, my kids, me, were a stranger’s eyes, a stranger’s eyes with nothing in them I could trust.

I should have understood why the evening was fragmentary, why I have difficulty recalling it now. Why Mike’s story was full of inconsistencies, nearly incoherent. Why Robby was shakier than I’d ever seen him. Why he was tense, weary, confused about what his next move should be. I’m tired, man, he kept saying. I’m tired. . . . You don’t know what it’s like, man. Running . . . running. Never no peace. Certain signs were clear at the time but they passed right by me. I thought I was giving my guests a few hours’ rest from danger, but they knew I was turning my house into a dangerous place. I believed I was providing a respite from pursuit. They knew they were leaving a trail, complicating the chase by stopping with me and my family. A few “safe” hours in my house weren’t long enough to come down from the booze, dope, and adrenaline high that fueled their flight. At any moment my front door could be smashed down. A gunfire fight begin. I thought they had stopped, but they were still on the road. I hadn’t begun to explore the depths of my naïveté, my bewilderment.

Only after two Laramie Police Department detectives arrived at dawn on February 12, a day too late to catch my brother, and treated me like a criminal, did I know I’d been one. Aiding and abetting a fugitive. Accessory after the fact to the crime of first-degree murder. The detectives hauled me down to the station. Demanded that I produce an alibi for the night a convenience store had been robbed in Utah. Four black men had been involved. Three had been tentatively identified, which left one unaccounted for. I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.

Robby passed through Laramie briefly and continued on his way. That’s about it. I wished for more, then and now. Most of what I can recall makes the evening of his visit seem bland, uneventful, though an incident in Jamila’s room, beside her crib, is an exception. That and the moment I watched Robby’s shoulders disappear down the hallway stairs to the kids’ playroom, where a roll-away cot and some extra mattresses had been set out for sleeping. Those moments imprinted. I’ll carry the sounds and sights to my grave.

I’d been alone with my brother a few minutes in the kitchen, then in the hall outside Jamila’s room. I advised him to stay in Laramie a few days, catch his breath, unwind. Warned him about the shoot-em-up mentality of Western cops, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the region. How three black men in a car would arouse suspicion anytime, anywhere they stopped.

Little else to say. I started a thousand conversations inside my head. None was appropriate, none addressed Robby’s anguish, his raw nerves. He was running, he was afraid, and nothing anyone said could bring the dead man in Pittsburgh back to life. I needed to hear Robby’s version of what had happened. Had there been a robbery, a shooting? Why? Why?

In our first private moment since I’d picked him up at Laramie Lanes, as we stood outside the baby’s room, my questions never got asked. Too many whys. Why did I want to know? Why was I asking? Why had this moment been so long in coming? Why was there a murdered man between us, another life to account for, now when we had just a few moments alone together? Perhaps Robby did volunteer a version of the crime. Perhaps I listened and buried what I heard. What I remember is telling him about the new baby. In the hall, then in her room, when we peeked in and discovered her wide awake in her crib, I recounted the events surrounding her birth.

Jamila. Her name means “beautiful” in Arabic. Not so much outer good looks as inner peace, harmony. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Neither Judy nor I knew the significance of the name when we chose it. We just liked the sound. It turns out to fit perfectly.

Your new niece is something else. Beautiful inside and out. Hard to believe how friendly and calm she is after all she’s been through. You’re the first one from home to see her.

I didn’t tell my brother the entire story. We’d need more time. Anyway, Judy should fill in the gory details. In a way it’s her story. I’d almost lost them both, wife and daughter. Judy had earned the right to tell the story. Done the bleeding. She was the one who nearly died giving birth.

Besides, on that night eight years ago I wasn’t ready to say what I felt. The incidents were too close, too raw. The nightmare ride behind an ambulance, following it seventy miles from Fort Collins to Denver. Not knowing, the whole time, what was happening inside the box of flashing lights that held my wife. Judy’s water had broken just after a visit to a specialist in Fort Collins. Emergency procedures were necessary because she had developed placenta previa, a condition that could cause severe hemorrhaging in the mother and fatal prematurity for her baby. I had only half listened to the doctor’s technical explanation of the problem. Enough to know it could be life-threatening to mother and infant. Enough to picture the unborn child trapped in its watery cell. Enough to get tight-jawed at the irony of nature working against itself, the shell of flesh and blood my woman’s body had wrapped round our child to protect and feed it also blocking the exit from her womb. Placenta previa meant a child’s only chance for life was cesarian section, with all the usual attendant risks extremely heightened.

Were the technicians in the back of the ambulance giving blood, taking blood? Were they administering oxygen to my wife? To our child? Needles, tubes, a siren wailing, the crackle of static as the paramedics communicated with doctors in Denver. Had the fetus already been rushed into the world, flopping helpless as a fish because its lungs were still too much like gills to draw breath from the air?

A long, bloody birth in Denver. Judy on the table three and a half hours. Eight pints of blood fed into her body as eight pints seeped out into a calibrated glass container beside the operating table. I had watched it happening. Tough throughout the cutting, the suturing, the flurries of frantic activity, the appearance of the slick, red fetus, the snipping of the umbilical, the discarding of the wet, liverish-looking, offending bag, tough until near the end when the steady ping, ping, ping of blood dripping into the jar loosened the knot of my detachment and my stomach flip-flopped once uncontrollably, heaving up bile to the brim of my throat. Had to get up off the stool then, step back from the center of the operating room, gulp fresh air.

With Judy recovered and Jamila home, relatively safe after a two-month ordeal in the hospital, I still couldn’t talk about how I had felt during my first visit to the preemie ward at Colorado General. I was shocked by the room full of tiny, naked, wrinkled infants, each enclosed in a glass cage. Festooned with tubes and needles, they looked less like babies than like ancient, shrunken little men and women, prisoners gathered for some bizarre reason to die together under the sizzling lights.

Jamila’s arms and legs were thinner than my thinnest finger. Her threadlike veins were always breaking down from the pressure of I.V.’s. Since I.V.’s were keeping her alive, the nurses would have to search for new places to stick the needles. Each time she received an injection or had her veins probed for an I.V., Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult, as if after all the willpower she’d expended enduring the pain and discomfort of birth, no one had anything better to do than jab her one more time. What made her cries even harder to bear was their tininess. In my mind her cries rocked the foundations of the universe; they were bellows anything, anywhere with ears and a soul could hear. In fact, the high-pitched squeaks were barely audible a few feet from her glass cage. You could see them better than hear them because the effort of producing each cry wracked her body.

My reactions to the preemie ward had embarrassed me. I couldn’t help thinking of the newborns as diseased or unnatural, as creatures from another planet, miniature junkies feeding in transparent kennels. I had to get over the shame of acknowledging my daughter was one of them. Sooner than I expected, the shame, the sense of failure disintegrated and was replaced by fear, a fear I had yet to shake. Would probably never completely get over. The traumas attending her birth, the long trial in the premature ward, her continuous touch-and-go flirtation with death had enforced the reality of Jamila’s mortality. My fear had been morbid at first but gradually it turned around. Each breath she drew, each step she negotiated became cause for celebration. I loved all my children, but this girl child was precious in a special way that had brought me closer to all three. Life and death. Pain and joy. Having and losing. You couldn’t experience one without the other. Background and foreground. The presence of my daughter would always remind me that things didn’t have to be the way they were. We could have lost her. Could lose her today. And that was the way it would always be. Ebb and flow. Touch and go. Her arrival shattered complacency. When I looked in her eyes I was reminded to love her and treasure her and all the people I loved because nothing could be taken for granted.

I had solemnly introduced the new baby to my brother.

This is your Uncle Robby.

Robby’s first reaction had been to say, grinning from ear to ear, She looks just like Mommy. . . . My God, she’s a little picture of Mom.

As soon as Robby made the connection, its lightness, its uncontestability, its uncanny truth hit me. Of course. My mother’s face rose from the crib. I remembered a sepia, tattered-edged, oval portrait of Mom as a baby. And another snapshot of Bette French in Freeda French’s lap on the steps of the house on Cassina Way. The fifty-year-old images hovered, opaque, halfway between the crib and my eyes, then faded, dissolving slowly, blending into the baby’s face, alive inside the new skin, part of the new life, linked forever by my brother’s words.

Robby took the baby in his arms. Coochy-cooed and gently rocked her, still marveling at the resemblance.

Lookit those big, pretty brown eyes. Don’t you see Mommy’s eyes?

Time continues to loosen my grasp on the events of Robby’s last free night. I’ve attempted to write about my brother’s visit numerous times since. One version was called “Running”; I conceived of it as fiction and submitted it to a magazine. The interplay between fiction and fact in the piece was too intense, too impacted, finally too obscure to control. Reading it must have been like sitting down at a bar beside a stranger deeply involved in an intimate conversation with himself. That version I’d thought of as a story was shortened and sent to Robby in prison. Though it didn’t quite make it as a story, the letter was filled with stories on which I would subsequently draw for two novels and a book of short fiction.

Even as I manufactured fiction from the events of my brother’s life, from the history of the family that had nurtured us both, I knew something of a different order remained to be extricated. The fiction writer was also a man with a real brother behind real bars. I continued to feel caged by my bewilderment, by my inability to see clearly, accurately, not only the last visit with my brother, but the whole long skein of our lives together and apart. So this book. This attempt to break out, to knock down the walls.

At a hearing in Colorado Johnny-Boy testified that Robby had re-counted to him a plot to rob a fence, a killing, the flight from Pittsburgh. After his performance as a cooperative witness for the state, a performance he would repeat in Pittsburgh at Robby’s trial, Johnny-Boy was carted away to Michigan, where he was wanted for murder. Robby and Michael were extradited to Pittsburgh, charged with armed robbery and murder, and held for trial. In separate trials both were convicted and given the mandatory sentence for felony murder: life imprisonment without possibility of probation or parole. The only way either man will ever be released is through commutation of his sentence. Pennsylvania’s governor is empowered to commute prison sentences, and a state board of commutations exists to make recommendations to him; but since the current governor almost never grants commutations, men in Pennsylvania’s prisons must face their life sentences with minimal hope of being set free.

Robby remained in custody six months before going on trial. Not until July 1978, after a two-year lockup in a county jail with no facilities for long-term prisoners, was Robby sentenced. Though his constitutional rights to a speedy trial and speedy sentencing had clearly been violated, neither those wrongs nor any others—including a prejudiced charge to the jury by the trial judge—which were brought to the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, moved that august body to intercede on Robert Wideman’s behalf. The last legal action in Robby’s case, the denial of his appeal by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, did not occur until September 1981. By that time Robby had already been remanded to Western State Penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence.

You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature’s genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough. The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.

When you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new, rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then? Twenty-odd years later, when you shuffled through the polished corridor of the Fort Collins, Colorado, courthouse dragging the weight of iron chains and fetters, I wanted to give you my hands again, help you make it across the floor again; I shot out a clenched fist, a black power sign, which caught your eye and made you smile in that citadel of whiteness. You made me realize I was tottering on the edge, leaning on you. You, in your baggy jumpsuit, three days’ scraggly growth on your face because they didn’t trust you with a razor, manacled hand and foot so you were theatrically displayed as their pawn, absolutely under their domination; you were the one clinging fast, taking the weight, and your dignity held me up. I was reaching for your strength.

Always there. The bad seed, the good seed. Mommy’s been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby . . . he wakes up in the morning looking for the party. She’s right, ain’t she? Mom’s nearly always right in her way, the special way she has of putting words together to take things apart. Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party. Still up there on the third floor under his covers and he’s thinking, Where’s it at today? What’s it gonna be today? Where’s the fun? And that’s how he’s been since the day the Good Lord put him on this earth. That’s your brother, Robert Douglas Wideman.

The Hindu god Venpadigedera returned to earth and sang to the people: Behold, the light shineth in all things. Birds, trees, the eyes of men, all giveth forth the light. Behold and be glad. Gifts wait for any who choose to see. Cover the earth with flowers. Shower flowers to the four corners. Rejoice in the bounty of the light.

The last time we were all together, cousin Kip took a family portrait. Mom and Daddy in a line with their children. The third generation of kids, a nappy-headed row in front. Five of us grown-up brothers and sisters hanging on one another’s shoulders. Our first picture together since I don’t remember when. We’re all standing on Mom’s about-to-buckle porch with cousin Kip down in the weeds of the little front yard pointing his camera up at us. I was half-scared those rickety boards would crack and we’d sink, arms still entwined, like some brown Titanic, beneath the rippling porch floor.

Before I saw the picture I had guessed how we’d look frozen in shades of black and white. I wasn’t too far off. Tish is grinning ear to ear—the proud girl child in the middle who’s survived the teasing and protections of her four brothers. Even though he isn’t, Gene seems the tallest because of the way he holds that narrow, perfect head of his balanced high and dignified on his long neck. Dave’s eyes challenge the camera, meet it halfway and dare it to come any closer, and the camera understands and keeps its distance from the smoldering eyes. No matter what Dave’s face seems to be saying—the curl of the lip that could be read as smile or sneer, as warning or invitation—his face also projects another level of ambiguity, the underground history of interracial love, sex, and hate, what a light-eyed, brown-skinned man like David embodies when he confronts other people. I’m grinning too (it’s obvious Tish is my sister) because our momentary togetherness was a reprieve, a possibility I believed I’d forfeited by my selfishness and hunger for more. Giddy almost, I felt like a rescued prince ringed by his strong, handsome people, my royal brothers and sister who’d paid my ransom. Tickled even by the swell and pitch of the rotting porch boards under my sandals.

You. You are mugging. Your best side dramatically displayed. The profile shot you’d have demanded on your first album, the platinum million seller you’d never cut but knew you could because you had talent and brains and you could sing and mimic anybody and that long body of yours and those huge hands were instruments more flexible and expressive than most people’s faces. You knew what you were capable of doing and knew you’d never get a chance to do it, but none of that defeat for the camera, no, only the star’s three-quarter profile. Billy Eckstineing your eyes, the Duke of Earl tilting the slim oval of your face forward to emphasize the pout of your full lips, the clean lines of your temples and cheekbones tapering down from the Afro’s soft explosion. Your stage would be the poolroom, the Saturday-night basement social, the hangout corner, the next chick’s pad you swept into with all the elegance of Smokey Robinson and the Count of Monte Cristo, slowly unbuttoning your cape, inching off your kid gloves, everything pantomimed with gesture and eye flutters till your rap begins and your words sing that much sweeter, purer for the quiet cradling them. You’re like that in the picture. Stylized, outrageous under your big country straw hat pushed back off your head. Acting. And Tish, holding up the picture to study it, will say something like, Look at you, boy. You ought to be ’shamed. And your mask will drop and you’ll grin cause Tish is like Mom, and ain’t no getting round her. So you’ll just grin back and you are Robby again at about age seven, cute and everybody’s pet, grin at Sis and say, “G’wan, girl.”

Daddy’s father, our grandfather, Harry Wideman, migrated from Greenwood, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He found a raw, dirty, double-dealing city. He learned its hills and rivers, the strange names of Dagos and Hunkies and Polacks who’d been drawn, as he had, by steel mills and coal mines, by the smoke and heat and dangerous work that meant any strong-backed, stubborn young man, even a black one, could earn pocketfuls of money. Grandpa’s personal quest connected him with hordes of other displaced black men seeking a new day in the promised land of the North. Like so many others, he boarded in an overcrowded rooming house, working hard by day, partying hard at night against the keen edge of exhaustion. When his head finally hit the pillow, he didn’t care that the sheets were still warm from the body of the man working nights who rented the bed ten hours a day while Harry pulled his shift at the mill.

Harry Wideman was a short, thick, dark man whose mahogany color passed on to Daddy, blended with the light, bright skin of John and Freeda French’s daughter Bette to produce the brown we wear. Do you remember anything about him, or were you too young? Have you ever wondered how the city appeared through his eyes, the eyes of a rural black boy far from home, a stranger in a strange land? Have you ever been curious? Grandpa took giant steps forward in time. As a boy not quite old enough to be much help in the fields, his job was looking out for Charley Rackett, his ancient, crippled grandfather, an African, a former slave. Grandpa listened to Charley Rackett’s African stories and African words, then lived to see white men on the moon. I think of Grandpa high up on Bruston Hill looking over the broad vista spreading out below him. He’s young and alone; he sees things with his loins as much as his eyes. Hills rolling to the horizon, toward the invisible rivers, are breasts and buttocks. Shadowed spaces, nestling between the rounded hills, summon him. Whatever happens to him in this city, whatever he accomplishes will be an answer to the soft, insinuating challenge thrown up at him as he stares over the teeming land. This city will measure his manhood. Our Father Who art . . . I hear prayer words interrupting his dreaming, disturbing the woman shapes his glance fashions from the landscape. The earth turns. He plants his seed. In the blink of an eye he’s an old man, close to death. He has watched the children of his children’s children born in this city. Some of his children’s children dead already. He ponders the wrinkled tar paper on the backs of his hands. Our Father. A challenge still rises from the streets and rooftops the way it once floated up from long-gone, empty fields. And the old man’s no nearer now to knowing, to understanding why the call digs so deeply at his heart.

Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand. Black music, blues and jazz, came to town in places like the Pythian Temple, the Ritz, the Savoy, the Showboat. In the bars on the North Side, Homewood, and the Hill you could get whatever you thought you wanted. Gambling, women, a good pork chop. Hundreds of families took in boarders to earn a little extra change. A cot in a closet in somebody’s real home seemed nicer, better than the dormitories with their barracks-style rows of beds, no privacy, one toilet for twenty men. Snores and funk, eternal coming and going because nobody wanted to remain in those kennels one second longer than he had to. Fights, thieves, people dragged in stinking drunk or bloody from the streets, people going straight to work after hanging out all night with some whore and you got to smell him and smell her beside you while you trying to pull your shift in all that heat. Lawd. Lawdy. Got no money in the bank. Joints was rowdy and mean and like I’m telling you if some slickster don’t hustle your money in the street or a party-time gal empty your pockets while you sleep and you don’t nod off and fall in the fire, then maybe you earn you a few quarters to send home for that wife and them babies waiting down yonder for you if she’s still waiting and you still sending. If you ain’t got no woman to send for then maybe them few quarters buy you a new shirt and a bottle of whiskey so you can find you some trifling body give all your money to.

The strong survive. The ones who are strong and lucky. You can take that back as far as you want to go. Everybody needs one father, two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and that’s only eight generations backward in time, eight generations linked directly, intimately with what you are. Less than 150 years ago, 128 men made love to 128 women, not all in the same hotel or on the same day but within a relatively short expanse of time, say twenty years, in places as distant as Igboland, New Amsterdam, and South Carolina. Unknown to each other, probably never even coming face to face in their lifetimes, each of these couples was part of the grand conspiracy to produce you. Think of a pyramid balanced on one of its points, a vast cone of light whose sides flare outward, vectors of force like the slanted lines kids draw to show a star’s shining. You once were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever-expanding V that opens to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram’s horn or conch shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle’s eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door.

The old people die. Our grandfathers, Harry Wideman and John French, are both gone now. The greatest space and no space at all separates us from them. I see them staring, dreaming this ravaged city; and we are in the dream, it’s our dream, enclosed, enclosing. We could walk down into that valley they saw from atop Bruston Hill and scoop up the houses, dismantle the bridges and tall buildings, pull cars and trucks off the streets, roll up roads and highways and stuff them all like toys into the cotton-picking sacks draped over our shoulders. We are that much larger than the things that happen to us. Accidents like the city poised at the meeting of three rivers, the city strewn like litter over precipitous hills.

Did our grandfathers run away from the South? Black Harry from Greenwood, South Carolina, mulatto white John from Culpepper, Virginia. How would they answer that question? Were they running from something or running to something? What did you figure you were doing when you started running? When did your flight begin? Was escape the reason or was there a destination, a promised land exerting its pull? Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to? Is freedom the motive and means and end and everything in between?

I wonder if the irony of a river beside the prison is intentional. The river was brown last time I saw it, mud-brown and sluggish in its broad channel. Nothing pretty about it, a working river, a place to dump things, to empty sewers. The Ohio’s thick and filthy, stinking of coal, chemicals, offal, bitter with rust from the flaking hulls of iron-ore barges inching grayly to and from the steel mills. But viewed from barred windows, from tiered cages, the river must call to the prisoners’ hearts, a natural symbol of flight and freedom. The river is a path, a gateway to the West, the frontier. Somewhere it meets the sea. Is it somebody’s cruel joke, an architect’s way of giving the knife a final twist, hanging this sign outside the walls, this river always visible but a million miles away beyond the spiked steel fence guarding its banks?

When I think of the distance between us in terms of miles or the height and thickness of walls or the length of your sentence or the deadly prison regimen, you’re closer to me, more accessible than when I’m next to you in the prison visiting room trying to speak and find myself at the edge of a silence vaster than oceans. I turned forty-three in June and you’ll be thirty-three in December. Not kids any longer by any stretch of the imagination. You’re my little brother and maybe it’s generally true that people never allow their little brothers and sisters to grow up, but something more seems at work here, something more damaging than vanity, than wishful thinking that inclines us to keep our pasts frozen, intact, keeps us calling our forty-year-old cronies “the boys” and a grown man “little brother.” I think of you as little brother because I have no other handle. At a certain point a wall goes up and easy memories stop.

When I think back, I have plenty of recollections of you as a kid. How you looked. The funny things you said. Till about the time you turned a gangly, stilt-legged, stringbean thirteen, we’re still family. Our lives connect in typical, family ways: holidays, picnics, births, deaths, the joking and teasing, the time you were a baby just home from the hospital and Daddy John French died and I was supposed to be watching you while the grown-ups cleaned and cooked, readying the house on Finance Street for visitors, for Daddy John to return and lie in his coffin downstairs. Baby-sitting you in Aunt Geraldine’s room while death hovered in there with us and no way I could have stayed in that room alone. Needing you much more than you needed me. You just zzz’ed away in your baby sleep, your baby ignorance. You couldn’t have cared less whether death or King Kong or a whole flock of those loose-feathered, giant birds haunting my sleep had gathered round your crib. If the folks downstairs were too quiet, my nerves would get jumpy and I’d snatch you up and walk the floor. Hold you pressed in my arms against my heart like a shield. Or if the night cracks and groans of the house got too loud, I’d poke you awake, worry you so your crying would keep me company.

After you turned thirteen, after you grew a mustache and fuzz on your chin and a voluminous Afro so nobody could call you “Beanhead” anymore, after girls and the move from Shadyside to Marchand Street so you started Westinghouse High instead of Peabody where the rest of us had done our time, you begin to get separate. I have to struggle to recall anything about you till you’re real again in prison. It’s as if I was asleep for fifteen years and when I awakened you were gone. I was out of the country for three years then lived in places like Iowa City and Philly and Laramie, so at best I couldn’t have seen much of you, but the sense of distance I’m trying to describe had more to do with the way I related to you than with the amount of time we spent together. We had chances to talk, opportunities to grow beyond the childhood bonds linking us. The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us.

Your hands, your face became a man’s. You accumulated scars, a deeper voice, lovers, but the changes taking place in you might as well have been occurring on a different planet. The scattered images I retain of you from the sixties through the middle seventies form no discernible pattern, are rooted in no vital substance like childhood or family. Your words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn. When we spoke, I was conscious of a third party short-circuiting our conversations. What I’d say to you came from the mouth of a translator who always talked down or up or around you, who didn’t know you or me but pretended he knew everything.

Was I as much a stranger to you as you seemed to me? Because we were brothers, holidays, family celebrations, and troubles drew us to the same rooms at the same time, but I felt uncomfortable around you. Most of what I felt was guilt I’d made my choices. I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. To get ahead, to make something of myself, college had seemed a logical, necessary step; my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I’d earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountains to Philadelphia. With that willed alienation behind me, between us, guilt was predictable. One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging, like the suntans people bring back from Hawaii in the middle of winter. It’s sure fucked up around here, ain’t it? But look at me, I got away. I got mine. I didn’t want to be caught looking back. I needed home to reassure myself of how far I’d come. If I ever doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty, rich white girls, a roommate from Long Island who unpacked more pairs of brand-new jockey shorts and T-shirts than they had in Kaufmann’s department store, if I ever had any hesitations or reconsiderations about the path I’d chosen, youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was.

Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any traces of the poverty, ignorance, and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned to Pittsburgh. Fear that I was contaminated and would carry the poison wherever I ran. Fear that the evil would be discovered in me and I’d be shunned like a leper.

I was scared stiff but at the same time I needed to prove I hadn’t lost my roots. Needed to boogie and drink wine and chase pussy, needed to prove I could still do it all. Fight, talk trash, hoop with the best playground players at Mellon Park. Claim the turf, wear it like a badge, yet keep my distance, be in the street but not of it.

Your world. The blackness that incriminated me. Easier to change the way I talked and walked, easier to be two people than to expose in either world the awkward mix of school and home I’d become. When in Rome. Different strokes for different folks. Nobody had pulled my coat and whispered the news about Third Worlds. Just two choices as far as I could tell: either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the Saints came marching in. Who the Saints, the rulers of the earth were, was clear. My mind was split by oppositions, by mutually exclusive categories. Manichaeism, as Frantz Fanon would say. To succeed in the man’s world you must become like the man and the man sure didn’t claim no bunch of nigger relatives in Pittsburgh.

Who, me? You must be kidding. You must be thinking of those other guys. They’re the ones listen to the Midnighters, the Miracles, the Turbans, Louis Berry, the Spaniels, the Flamingos. My radio stays set on WFLN. They play that nigger stuff way down the dial, at the end, on WDAS, down where WAMO is at home.

Some of that mess so dumb, so unbelievable I can laugh now. Like when I was driving you up to Maine to work as a waiter in summer camp. Just you and me and Judy in the car for the long haul from Pittsburgh to Takajo on Long Lake. Nervous the whole time because you kept finding black music on the radio. Not only did you find it. You played it loud and sang along. Do wah diddy and ow bop she bop, having a good ole nigger ball like you’d seen me having with my cut buddies when we were the Commodores chirping tunes on the corner and in Mom’s living room. The music we’d both grown up hearing and loving and learning to sing, but you were doing it in my new 1966 Dodge Dart, on the way to Martha’s Vineyard and Maine with my new white wife in the backseat. Didn’t you know we’d left Pittsburgh, didn’t you understand that classical music volume moderate was preferred in these circumstances? Papa’s got a brand-new bag. And you were gon act a nigger and let the cat out.

Of course I was steady enjoying the music, too. James Brown. Baby Ray and the Raylettes. The Drifters. Missed it on the barren stretches of turnpike between cities. Having it both ways. Listening my ass off and patting my foot but in between times wondering how Judy was reacting, thinking about how I’d complain later about your monolithic fondness for rhythm and blues, your habit of turning the volume up full blast. In case she was annoyed, confused, or doubting me in any way, I’d reassure her by disassociating myself from your tastes, your style. Yeah, when I was a kid. Yes. Once upon a time I was like that but now. . .

Laughing now to keep from crying when I think back to those days.

My first year at college when I was living in the dorms a white boy asked me if I liked the blues. Since I figured I was the blues I answered, Yeah, sure. We were in Darryl Dawson’s room. Darryl and I comprised approximately one-third of the total number of black males in our class. About ten of the seventeen hundred men and women who entered the University of Pennsylvania as freshmen in 1959 were black. After a period of wariness and fencing, mutual embarrassment and resisting the inevitable, I’d buddied up with Darryl, even though he’d attended Putney Prep School in Vermont and spoke with an accent I considered phony. Since the fat white boy in work shirt, motorcycle boots, and dirty jeans was in Darryl’s room, I figured maybe the guy was alright in spite of the fact he asked dumb questions. I’d gotten used to answering or ignoring plenty of those in two months on campus. “Yeah, sure,” should have closed the topic but the white boy wasn’t finished. He said he had a big collection of blues records and that I ought to come by his room sometime with Darryl and dig, man.

Who do you like? Got everybody, man. Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. Lightning and Lemon and Sonny Boy. You dig Broonzy? Just copped a new side of his.

None of the names meant a thing to me. Maybe I’d heard Leadbelly at a party at a white girl’s house in Shadyside but the other names were a mystery. What was this sloppy-looking white boy talking about? His blond hair, long and greasy, was combed back James Dean style. Skin pale and puffy like a Gerber baby. He wore a smartass, whole-lot-hipper-than-you expression on his face. His mouth is what did it. Pudgy, soft lips with just a hint of blond fuzz above them, pursed into a permanent sneer.

He stared at me, waiting for an answer. At home we didn’t get in other people’s faces like that. You talked toward a space and the other person had a choice of entering or not entering, but this guy’s blue eyes bored directly into mine. Waiting, challenging, prepared to send a message to that sneering mouth. I wanted no part of him, his records, or his questions.

Blues. Well, that’s all I listen to. I like different songs at different times. Midnighters. Drifters got one I like out now.

Not that R-and-B crap on the radio, man. Like the real blues. Down home country blues. The old guys picking and singing.

Ray Charles. I like Ray Charles.

Hey, that ain’t blues. Tell him, Darryl.

Darryl don’t need to tell me anything. Been listening to blues all my life. Ray Charles is great. He’s the best there is. How you gon tell me what’s good and not good? It’s my music. I’ve been hearing it all my life.

You’re still talking about rock ’n’ roll. Rhythm and blues. Most of it’s junk. Here today and gone tomorrow crap. I’m talking about authentic blues. Big Bill Broonzy. The Classics.

When he talked, he twisted his mouth so the words slithered out of one corner of his face, like garbage dumped off one end of a cafeteria tray. He pulled a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket. Lit it without disturbing the sneer.

Bet you’ve never even heard Bill Broonzy.

Don’t need to hear no Broonzy or Toonsy or whoever the fuck he is. I don’t give a shit about him nor any of them other old-timey dudes you’re talking about, man. I know what I like and you can call it rhythm and blues or rock ’n’ roll, it’s still the best music. It’s what I like and don’t need nobody telling me what’s good.

What are you getting mad about, man? How can you put down something you know nothing about? Bill Broonzy is the greatest twelve-string guitar player who ever lived. Everybody knows that. You’ve never heard a note he’s played but you’re setting yourself up as an expert. This is silly. You obviously can’t back up what you’re saying. You have a lot to learn about music, my friend.

He’s wagging his big head and looking over at Darryl like Darryl’s supposed to back his action. You can imagine what’s going through my mind. How many times I’ve already gone upside his fat jaw. Biff. Bam. My fists were burning. I could see blood running out both his nostrils. The sneer split at the seams, smeared all over his chin. Here’s this white boy in this white world bad-mouthing me to one of the few black faces I get to see, messing with the little bit of understanding I’m beginning to have with Darryl. And worse, trespassing on the private turf of my music, the black sounds from home I carry round in my head as a saving grace against the pressures of the university.

Talk about uptight. I don’t believe that pompous ass could have known, because even I didn’t know at that moment, how much he was hurting me. What hurt most was the truth of what he was saying. His whiteness, his arrogance made me mad, but it was truth putting the real hurt on me.

I didn’t hit him. I should have but never did. A nice forget-me-knot upside his jaw. I should have but didn’t. Not that time. Not him. Smashing his mouth would have been too easy, so I hated him instead. Let anger and shame and humiliation fill me to overflowing so the hate is still there, today, over twenty years later. The dormitory room had pale green walls, a bare wooden floor, contained the skimpy desk and sagging cot allotted to each cubicle in the hall. Darryl’s things scattered everywhere. A self-portrait he’d painted stared down from one dirt-speckled wall. The skin of the face in the portrait was wildly molded, violent bruises of color surrounding haunted jade eyes. Darryl’s eyes were green like my brother David’s, but I hadn’t noticed their color until I dropped by his room one afternoon between classes and Darryl wasn’t there and I didn’t have anything better to do than sit and wait and study the eyes in his painting. Darryl’s room had been a sanctuary but when the white boy started preaching there was no place to hide. Even before he spoke the room had begun to shrink. He sprawled, lounged, an exaggerated casualness announcing how comfortable he felt, how much he belonged. Lord of the manor wherever he happened to plant his boots.

Darryl cooled it. His green eyes didn’t choose either of us when we looked toward him for approval. Dawson had to see what a miserable corner I was in. He had to feel that room clamped tight around my neck and the sneer tugging the noose tighter.

A black motorcycle jacket, carved from a lump of coal, studded with silver and rhinestones, was draped over the desk chair. I wanted to stomp it, chop it into little pieces.

Hey, you guys, knock it off. Let’s talk about something else. Obviously you have different tastes in music.

Darryl knew damn well that wasn’t the problem. Together we might have been able to say the right things. Put the white boy in his place. Recapture some breathing space. But Darryl had his own ghosts to battle. His longing for his blonde, blue-eyed Putney girl friend whose parents had rushed her off to Europe when they learned of her romance with the colored boy who was Putney school president His ambivalence toward his blackness that would explode one day and hurtle him into the quixotic campaign of the Black Revolutionary Army to secede from the United States. So Darryl cooled it that afternoon in his room and the choked feeling never left my throat. I can feel it now as I write.

Why did that smartass white son of a bitch have so much power over me? Why could he confuse me, turn me inside out, make me doubt myself? Waving just a tiny fragment of truth, he could back me into a corner. Who was I? What was I? Did I really fear the truth about myself that much? Four hundred years of oppression, of lies had empowered him to use the music of my people as a weapon against me. Twenty years ago I hadn’t begun to comprehend the larger forces, the ironies, the obscenities that permitted such a reversal to occur. All I had sensed was his power, the raw, crude force mocking me, diminishing me. I should have smacked him. I should have affirmed another piece of the truth he knew about me, the nigger violence.

Darryl and I would ride buses across Philly searching for places like home. Like the corner of Frankstown and Bruston in Homewood. A poolroom, barbershop, rib joint, record store strip with bloods in peacock colors strolling up and down and hanging out on the corner. After a number of long, unsuccessful expeditions (how could you ask directions? Who in the island of University would know what you were asking, let alone be able to tell you how to get there?), we found South Street. Just over the bridge, walking distance if you weren’t in a hurry, but as far from school, as close to home as we could get. Another country.

Coming home from the university, from people and situations that continually set me against them and against myself, I was a dangerous person. If I wanted to stay in one piece and stay in school, I was forced to pull my punches. To maintain any semblance of dignity and confidence I had to learn to construct a shell around myself. Be cool. Work on appearing dignified, confident. Fool people with appearances, surfaces, live my real life underground in a region where no one could touch me. The trouble with this survival mechanism was the time and energy expended on upkeep of the shell. The brighter, harder, more convincing and impenetrable the shell became, the more I lost touch with the inner sanctuary where I was supposed to be hiding. It was no more accessible to me than it was to the people I intended to keep out. Inside was a breeding ground for rage, hate, dreams of vengeance.

Nothing original in my tactics. I’d adopted the strategy of slaves, the oppressed, the powerless. I thought I was running but I was fashioning a cage. Working hand in hand with my enemies. Knowledge of my racial past, of the worldwide struggle of people of color against the domination of Europeans would have been invaluable. History could have been a tool, a support in the day-to-day confrontations I experienced in the alien university environment. History could have taught me I was not alone, my situation was not unique. Believing I was alone made me dangerous, to myself and others.

College was a time of precipitous ups and downs. I was losing contact with the truth of my own feelings. Not trusting, not confiding in anyone else, learning to mistrust and deny my own responses left me no solid ground, nowhere to turn. I was an expert at going with the flow, protecting myself by taking on the emotional or intellectual coloring of whatever circumstance I found myself in. All of this would have been bad enough if I’d simply been camouflaging my feelings. Yet it was far worse. I had no feelings apart from the series of roles and masquerades I found myself playing. And my greatest concern at the time had nothing to do with reestablishing an authentic core. What I feared most and spent most of my energy avoiding, was being unmasked.

Away from school I worked hard at being the same old home boy everybody remembered, not because I identified with that mask but because I didn’t want youall to discover I was a traitor. Even at home a part of me stood outside, watching me perform. Even within the family. The watching part was unnamable. I hated it and depended on it. It was fear and cunning and anger and alienation; it was chaos, a yawning emptiness at the center of my being.

Once, in Wyoming, I saw a gut-shot antelope. A bullet had dropped the animal abruptly to its knees. It waggled to its feet again, tipsy, dazed. Then it seemed to hear death, like a prairie fire crackling through the sagebrush at its heels. The antelope bolted, a flat-out, bounding sprint, trailing guts like streamers from its low-slung potbelly. I was running that hard, that fast, but without the antelope’s blessed ignorance. I knew I was coming apart.

I could get ugly, vicious with people real quick. They’d think they knew the person they were dealing with, then I’d turn on them. Get drunk or fed up or just perverse for perversity’s sake. Exercise the dark side of my power. Become a stranger, a different person. I’d scare people, hurt them. What I did to others, I was doing to myself. I wasn’t sure I cried real tears, bled real blood. Didn’t know whose eyes stared back at me from the mirror. Problem is, I’m not talking about ancient history. I’ve changed. We’ve all changed. A lot’s happened in the last twenty years. But what I was, I still am. You have to know this. My motives remain suspect. A potential for treachery remains deep inside the core. I can blend with my surroundings, become invisible. An opaque curtain slides down between me and others, between the part of me that judges and weighs and is accountable for my actions and that part that acts. Then, as always, I’m capable of profound irresponsibility. No way of being accountable because there’s no one, no place to turn to.

I try harder these days. Love, marriage, children, a degree of success in the world, leisure to reconsider, to reason with myself, to read and write have increased my insight and altered my perspective. But words like “insight” and “altered perspective” are bullshit. They don’t tell you what you need to know. Am I willing to go all the way? Be with you? Share the weight? Go down with you wherever you have to go? No way to know beforehand. Words can’t do that. Words may help me find you. Then we’ll have to see. . . .

You’ve seen Jamila almost yearly. Since she was a baby she’s accompanied us on our visits to the prison. One of the family. I date your time in prison by her age. She used to cry coming and going. Now she asks questions, the hard kind I can’t answer. The kinds of questions few in this society bother to pose about the meaning, the intent, the utility of locking people behind bars.

How long will Robby be in cage?

In a book about the evolution of imprisonment during the Middle Ages I discovered the word “jail” does in fact derive from “cage.” Prisons in medieval England were basically custodial cages where convicted felons awaited punishment or the accused were held till traveling magistrates arrived to pass judgment. At specified towns or villages within the circuit of his jurisdiction a justice would sit (old French assise, hence the modern “assizes”), and prisoners would be transported from gaol to have their fate determined. Jamila knew what she was talking about We said “jail” and she heard “cage,” heard steel doors clanking, iron locks rattling, remembered animals penned in the zoo. Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, reveal the history buried in sounds. They haven’t forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words—rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition—children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

Maybe Jamila’s a yardstick for you too. Years registering in terms of pounds and inches. The changes in her body are the reality of time passing, the reality less observable in your outward appearance. People ask, How’s Robby? and I don’t know what to answer. If I say he’s okay, people take that to mean he’s the same. He’s still the person we knew when he was free. I don’t want to give anyone that impression of you. I know you’re changing, growing as fast as Jamila. No one does time outside of time.

A narrow sense of time as a material entity, as a commodity like money that can be spent, earned, lost, owed, or stolen is at the bottom of the twisted logic of incarceration. When a person is convicted of a crime, the state dispossesses that criminal of a given number of days, months, years. Time pays for crime. By surrendering a certain portion of his allotment of time on earth the malefactor pays his debt to society.

But how does anyone do time outside of time? Since a person can’t be removed from time unless you kill him, what prison does to its inmates is make time as miserable, as unpleasant, as possible. Prison time must be hard time, a metaphorical death, a sustained, twilight condition of death-in-life. The prisoner’s life is violently interrupted, enclosed within a parenthesis. The point is to create the fiction that he doesn’t exist. Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.

Yet the little death of a prison sentence doesn’t quite kill the prisoner, because prisons, in spite of their ability to make the inmate’s life unbearable, can’t kill time. Incarceration as punishment always achieves less and more than its intent. No matter how drastically you deprive a prisoner of the benefits of society, abridge his civil and legal rights, unman and torture him, unless you take his life, you can’t take away his time. Many inmates die violently in prisons, almost all suffer in ways beyond an outsider’s comprehension, but life goes on and since it does, miracles occur. Bodies languish, spirits are broken, yet in some rare cases the prison cell becomes the monk’s cell, exile a spiritual retreat, isolation the blessed solitude necessary for self-examination, self-discipline.

In spite of all the measures Western society employs to secularize time, time transcends the conventional social order. Prisoners can be snatched from that order but not from time. Time imprisons us all. When the prisoner returns to society after serving his time, in an important sense he’s never been away. Prisoners cannot step into the same river twice—prison may have rendered them unfit to live in free society, prison may have radically altered the prisoner’s sense of self, his relation to his family and friends—but the river never goes away; it breaches the walls, washes them, washes us. We only pretend the prisoner has gone away.

We visit you in prison. Here we come. The whole family. Judy, Dan, Jake, Jamila. Our nuclear unit and Mom and whoever else we can fit into the Volvo station wagon. We try to arrive at the prison as early as possible, but with five in our crew competing for time and space in Mom’s tiny bathroom in the house on Tokay, and slow-as-molasses nieces Monique and Tameka to pick up in East Liberty after we’re all ready, we’re lucky if we set off before noon. But here we come. Getting ready as we’d get ready for any family outing. Baths, teeth brushed, feeding, coaxing, the moment somewhere at the height of the bustle, frustration, and confusion when I say to myself, Shit. Is it worth all this hassle? Let’s just call it off. Let’s muzzle these little beasts and go back to bed and forget the whole thing. But we persevere. We’re on our way.

Jamila is the youngest visitor. Five and a half years old, my only daughter, your niece, approximately three feet tall, at the time of this visit, this visit which can stand for all visits. She has very large eyes. Mom’s eyes, you christened them in Laramie; she is petite but built strong, taut like her mother. It’s summer so her skin is tanned a golden-toned beige. As a consequence of prematurity and having her head shaved so feeding tubes could be inserted in the veins crisscrossing her skull, for a long while Jamila was bald. Now her hair is coming in nicely, tending to blond at the wispy edges where it curls loose from whatever style her mother chooses to bind it in. She is a beautiful child, I think. She moves with an athletic grace and economy. Jamila chatters incessantly and makes friends easily. A blithe, fey quality attracts people to her. Already she’s aware of the seductive power of her enormous, curly eyelashes, the deep, brown pools of her eyes. She’s remarkably sophisticated in conversation, in her capacity to listen and concentrate on what other people are saying. She grasps abstract ideas quickly, intuitively. Her early flirtation with death has without a doubt stamped her personality. She’s curious about graveyards. Keeps track of them when we make trips. When we go to the beach, Mom, there’s three. Like her brother, Jake, whom she resembles in skin tone and features, she possesses the gift of feeling. One of her good friends, Vass, resides in the Laramie cemetery. Jamila picked up this buddy by reading his name on a large headstone visible from the road and greets him cheerily whenever we drive past the clutter of tombstones abutting the fence on Fifteenth Street.

Jamila, tell me about going to see Robby. What do you remember about going to visit him?

Usually when we go there, when we go there . . . the visiting place . . . he eats an apple. And he wears braids. Or sometimes he would . . . got that? . . . get Doritos instead.

Yes, I got that, smartass. I’ll write it down. You just try to remember what you think when we visit.

Looks like Stevie Wonder.

What else?

I remember him being sort of happy . . . happy to see us.

Why sort of?

Well, because he was sort of happy to see us and not happy he was in jail.

Anything else?

I think about him getting out of cage.

Should they let him out?

Yes. Because he wants to see people and be around other people and have life outside of him and jail.

Do you remember anything he said?

It’s nice to see you. I remember Robby saying that. And the activity place. Crayons and stuff. Telling the names of characters up on the wall.

Do you talk to people about Robby?

No. It’s sort of like a secret. It’s a secret because other people . . . why would they be interested in it, because they don’t see him and they don’t know him and it’s not none of their business.

Would you talk to anyone about him?

Maybe one of my special friends like Jens. He would know what I’m talking about. Even though he’s the youngest of all of us in Open School. I know Jens would understand more than anybody else because he would understand more. Like if I told Claire she would just say, Oh. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about, but Jens he would tell me a different story and I would know he would understand.

Anything else you can remember?

One time when we went there and we were finding out we couldn’t see him that day, I heard him call and say come back another time.

Why’s he in jail?

So that he doesn’t go out and do the same thing again. They’re keeping him there till they think that he won’t do the same thing again.

When everybody’s finally ready and in, I back the Volvo station wagon down the steep, cobblestone street to the intersection of Tokay and Seagirt. There I can turn around, ease the wagon’s rear end into Seagirt, point us toward Bennett Street, and we’re on our way. Backing down Tokay can be a real trick at busy traffic times of day. It’s a chore anytime, fighting the high, broken curb, the blind corners where cars from Seagirt and Bricelyn pop into Tokay. Cars come at you shuddering down the hill, cars behind your back gun their engines for a running start up Tokay. In Homewood you still get points for laying rubber, for flying full blast down the precipitous, potholed slopes of streets like Tokay and Seagirt. People enjoy tearing up big, shiny cars. But early in the morning, at the hour we shoot for when we visit you in prison, the streets are relatively quiet.

Down Tokay, left on Bennett, seven blocks over to Braddock till it crosses Penn Avenue, and Homewood’s behind us. That quick. That little snatch of Bennett, then Braddock till it crosses Penn carry us past the heart of the ghetto. Or where the heart once was. Since 1860 black people have lived in a pocket of streets, dirt paths before they were paved, between Homewood Avenue and Dunfermline Street. Kelly, Hamilton, Tioga, Cassina, Susquehanna, Finance—Braddock Avenue touches them all before passing under a concrete bridge that launches trains into the sky of Homewood. The railroad tracks linking this bridge on Braddock with the one over Homewood Avenue separate Homewood from the once predominantly white neighborhoods along its southern edge. When we lived on Finance Street those tracks marked one border of my world. Across Finance the pavement ended. A steep, weed-covered embankment rose to the railroad tracks. Before you were born, my sleep was couched in the rhythm of trains. Some nights I’d lie awake waiting for the crash of steel wheels, for the iron fist to grab me and shake me, for the long, echoing silence afterward to carry me away. Homewood was a valley between the thunder of the tracks and the quiet hills to the east, hills like Bruston, up whose flanks narrow streets meandered or, like Tokay, shot straight to the sky.

Homewood’s always been the wrong side of the tracks from the perspective of its white neighbors south of Penn Avenue. On the wrong side of the tracks—under the tracks, if the truth be told—in a deep hollow between Penn and the abrupt rise of Bruston Hill. When we leave for the prison the five minutes we spend negotiating an edge of this valley seem to take forever. Traffic lights on every corner attempt to slow down people for whom driving is not so much a means of moving from one place to another as a display of aggression, fearlessness, and style. When you drive an automobile in Homewood you commit yourself to a serious game of chicken. On narrow, two-way streets like Finance you automatically whip down the center, claiming it, daring anyone to buck your play. Inside your car with WAMO cooking on the radio, you are lord and master and anyplace your tires kiss becomes your domain. Jesus have mercy on the chump who doesn’t get out your way.

The trip to visit you in prison begins with me behind the wheel, backing down Tokay then trying to run a string of green lights to get us quickly out of Homewood. No matter how skillfully I cheat on yellow, one or two red lights catch us and that’s part of the reason it seems to take so long to cover a short distance. But being stalled by a red light does not slow us down as much as the weight of the Homewood streets in my imagination. The streets had been my stomping ground, my briar patch. The place I’d fled from with all my might, the place always snatching me back.

Memories of the streets are dense, impacted. Threads of guilt bind each tapestry of associations. Guilt bright red as the black blood sealed beneath Homewood’s sidewalks. Someone had stripped Homewood bare, mounted it, and ridden it till it collapsed and lay dying, sprawled beneath the rider, who still spurred it and bounced up and down and screamed, Giddyup. I knew someone had done that to Homewood, to its people, to me. The evidence plain as day through the windshield of my car: an atrocious crime had been committed and I had witnessed it, continued to witness it during those short visits home each summer or for the Christmas holidays, yet I did nothing about what I saw. Not the crime, not the damage that had been wrought. I knew too much but most of the time counted myself lucky because I had escaped and wasn’t required to act on what I knew. Today, this morning on the way to visit you in Western Penitentiary, the rape of Homewood was being consummated, was flourishing in broad daylight, and nobody, including me, was uttering a mumbling word.

A need to go slowly, to register each detail of violated terrain competes with an urge to get the hell out before some doped-up fool without insurance or a pot to piss in comes barreling out of a side street and totals my new Volvo wagon. Cords at the back of my neck ache. Street names trigger flashbacks. Uncle Ote’s laughing voice, the blue-flowered china bowl in my grandmother’s closet, Aunt Geraldine sneaking me a hot sausage smothered in peppers and onions from DiLeo’s late on Saturday night, hiding in the stiff weeds on the hillside, riding on Big Melvin’s shoulders. Melvin was a giant and twenty years old but played with us kids and was dumber than a stone and died under the wheels of a bread truck because he was too dumb to cross Tioga Street. Fragments. A blues verse fading in and out. Got two minds to leave here. Just one telling me stay.

The parkway parallels the Monongahela River. Below us, across the water, on the South Side are some of the steel mills that gave Pittsburgh its claim to fame. The smokestacks of Jones & Laughlin and United States Steel. People say better steel is manufactured now across the ocean in Japan and Scandinavia. Better steel produced more efficiently by modern, computerized mills. I don’t doubt it. J & L’s huge blast furnaces appear antique. Old, rusty guts that the ghost of Fred Willis, the junkman, will rip off one night and cart away. From the colonial period onward, steel determined the economic health of Pittsburgh and it continues to color the city’s image of itself. Steeltown, U.S.A. Home of the Iron Dukes and NFL Champion Steelers. Home of Iron City Beer. But for decades Pittsburgh’s steel industry has been suffering from foreign competition. Miles of deserted sheds, part of J & L’s original mill stretch below the highway. Too many layoffs and cutbacks and strikes. Too much greed and too little imagination in the managerial class, too much alienation among workers. Almost any adult male in Pittsburgh, black or white, can tell you a story about how these hulking, rusty skeletons lining the riverfront haunted his working life.

To get to the North Side of the city from the parkway, I exit at Fort Duquesne Bridge. After the bridge the car winds around Three Rivers Stadium. It’s a dumb way to go but I don’t get lost. Inside the concrete bowl tiers of orange, blue, and gold seats are visible. Danny and Jake always have something to say here. Danny is a diehard Steelers fan and Jake roots for the team closest to home, the Denver Broncos. One brother will remind the other of a play, a game in the series between the two AFC rivals. Then it’s put down and shout down till one silences the other or an adult short-circuits impending mayhem and silences both. I still live and die with the Steelers but I stay out of the bickering, unless they need a fact confirmed, which they need me for less and less each year as their grasp of stats and personalities begins to exceed mine. Even if I’m not consulted (and it hurts a little when I’m not), I welcome the diversion. I listen to them squabble and I pick my way through confusing signs and detours and blind turns that, if I’m lucky, get us off the merry-go-round ramps circling Three Rivers and down onto Ohio River Boulevard.

Again we parallel a river, this time the brown Ohio. To an outsider Pittsburgh must seem all bridges, tunnels, rivers, and hills. If you’re not climbing into the sky or burrowing into the bowels of the earth, you’re suspended, crossing water or looking down on a hodgepodge scramble of houses strewn up and down the sides of a ravine. You’d wonder how people live clinging to terraced hillsides. Why they trust ancient, doddering bridges to ferry them over the void. Why they truck along at seventy miles an hour on a narrow shelf chiseled in the stone shoulders of a mountain. A funicular railway erected in 1875 inches up Mount Washington, connecting the lower South Side to Duquesne Heights. Pittsburghers call it the Incline. Ride the rickety cars up the mountain’s sheer face for fun now, since tunnels and expressways and bridges have made the Incline’s service obsolete.

After Fort Duquesne Bridge and the Stadium, we’re on the North Side, an adjoining city called Allegheny until it was incorporated into Pittsburgh proper in 1907. Urban renewal has destroyed nearly all the original residential buildings. We skirt the high rises, low rises, condos, malls, the shopping centers, singles bars, and discos that replaced the stolid, foursquare architecture of Old Allegheny. Twin relics, two ugly, ornate, boxish buildings squat deserted on Ohio River Boulevard. When I see these unusual structures, I know I’ve lucked out, that I’ve negotiated the maze of dead ends, one-ways, and anonymous streets and all that’s left is a straight shot out the boulevard to the prison.

*

Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it. The prison should be dark and forbidding, but either its stone walls have been sandblasted or they’ve somehow escaped the decades of industrial soot raining from the sky.

Western is a direct descendant of the world’s first penitentiary, Philadelphia’s Quaker-inspired Walnut Street Jail, chartered in 1773. The good intentions built into the Walnut Street Jail—the attempt to substitute an enforced regime of solitary confinement, labor, and moral rehabilitation, for the whipping post, pillory, fines, and executions of the British penal code—did not exempt that humane experiment from the ills that beset all societies of caged men. Walnut Street Jail became a cesspool, overcrowded, impossible to maintain, wracked by violence, disease, and corruption. By the second decade of the nineteenth century it was clear that the reforms instituted in the jail had not procured the results its zealous supporters had envisioned, and two new prisons, one for the east, one for the western half of the state, were mandated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. From the ashes of the Walnut Street experiment rose the first Western penitentiary. The architect, a William Strickland known for revivals of classic Greek models and his engineering skill, created a classic of a different sort on a plain just west of Allegheny City. With massive, forbidding bulwarks, crenellated parapets, watchtowers buttressing the corners of the walls, his notion of a prison recapitulated the forms of medieval fear and paranoia.

The immediate successor of Strickland’s Norman castle was constructed sporadically over a period of seventeen years. This new Western, grandson of the world’s first penitentiary, received its first contingent of prisoners in 1886, and predictably black men made up a disproportionate percentage of these pioneers, who were marched in singing. Today, nearly a hundred years later, having survived floods, riots, scandals, fires, and blue-ribboned panels of inquiry, Western remains in working order.

Approaching the prison from Ohio River Boulevard, you can see coils of barbed wire and armed guards atop the ramparts. The steepled towers that, like dunce caps, once graced its forty-foot walls have been lopped off. There’s a visitors’ parking lot below the wall facing the boulevard. I ignore it and pull into the fenced lot beside the river, the one marked Official Business Only. I save everybody a quarter-mile walk by parking in the inner lot. Whether it’s summer or winter, that last quarter mile can be brutal. Sun blazing down on your head or icy wind off the river, or snow or rain or damp fog creeping off the water, and nothing but one high, gritty wall that you don’t want to hug no matter how much protection it might afford. I drive through the tall gate into the official business lot because even if the weather’s summery pleasant, I want to start the visit with a small victory, be one up on the keepers. Because that’s the name of the game and chances are I won’t score again. I’ll be playing on their turf, with their ball and their rules, which are nothing if not one-sided, capricious, cruel, and corrupting. What’s written says one thing. But that’s not really the way things are. Always a catch. Always an angle so the published rules don’t literally apply. What counts are the unwritten rules. The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-sleight-of-hand rules whose function is to humiliate visitors and preserve the absolute, arbitrary power of the keepers.

Onto whose lot we trespass. Pulling as close to the visitors’ building as possible. Not too close because the guard on duty in the kiosk adjacent to the stairs of the visitors’ annex might feel compelled to turn us back if we break into the narrow compass of his alertness. Close but far enough away so he’d have to poke out his head and shout to get our attention.

I find a space and the kids scoot out of their seats. Tish’s girls are with us so we used the way back of the station wagon. For safety the rear hatch unlocks only from outside, so I insert the key and lift the lid and Danny and Jake and Tameka scramble out to join the others.

“We’re in a parking lot, so watch for cars!” I shout after them as they race down the broad center lane of the parking area. What else can I say? Cramped in the car for the past half hour, they’re doing now what they need to do. Long-legged, snake-hipped, brown children. They had tried to walk in an orderly fashion, smallest one grabbing largest one’s hand, lock step, slowly, circumspectly, progressing in that fashion for approximately three steps before one tore away and another followed and they’re all skipping and scampering now, polished by the sun. Nobody sprints toward the prison full tilt, they know better than that, but they get loose, flinging limbs and noise every which way. They crunch over a patch of gravel. Shorts and T-shirts make their bodies appear vulnerable, older and younger at the same time. Their high-pitched cries bounce off the looming wall. I keep my eyes on them as I lock the car. No real danger here but lessons, lessons everywhere, all the time. Every step and the way you take it here on enemy ground is a lesson.

*

Mom and Judy walk side by side, a black woman and a white woman, the white one tanned darker than the black. They add their two cents’ worth of admonitions to the kids. Walk, don’t run. Get Jamila’s hand. Be careful. Slow down, youall. I fall in behind them. Far enough away to be alone. To be separate from the women and separate from the children. I need to say to whoever’s watching—guards, prisoners invisible behind the barred three-story windows partitioning the walls, These are my people. They’re with me. I’m responsible. I need to say that, to hang back and preside, to stroll, almost saunter, aware of the weight, the necessity of vigilance because here I am, on alien turf, a black man, and I’m in charge. For a moment at least these women, these children have me to turn to. And I’m one hundred percent behind them, prepared to make anyone who threatens them answer to me. And that posture, that prerogative remains rare for a black man in American society. Rare today, over 120 years after slavery and second-class citizenship have been abolished by law. The guards know that. The prisoners know. It’s for their benefit as well as my own and my family’s that I must carry myself in a certain way, make certain rules clear even though we are entering a hostile world, even though the bars exist to cut off the possibility of the prisoners seeing themselves as I must see myself, striding free, in charge of women and children, across the official lot.

Grass grows in the margin between the spiked fence paralleling the river and the asphalt lot. Grass clipped harshly, uniformly as the bristle heads of convicts in old movies about prison. Plots of manicured green define a path leading to steps we must climb to enter the visitors’ building. Prisoner trustees in ill-fitting blue uniforms—loose tunics, baggy, string-tied trousers a shade darker—putter at various make-work jobs near the visitors’ entrance. Another prisoner, farther away, near the river edge of the parking lot sidles into a slate-gray Mercedes sedan. A pudgy, bull-necked white guy. When he plops into the driver’s seat the car shudders. First thing he does is lower the driver’s side window and hang out his ham arm. Then full throttle he races the Mercedes engine, obviously relishing the roar, as pleased with himself as he’d been when the precise, solid slam of the door sealed him in. If the driver is hot shit, big shot for a few seconds behind the wheel, he’ll pay for the privilege soon enough when he adds the Mercedes to the row of Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks he must scrub and spit shine for the bosses.

Another prisoner leans on a push broom. The asphalt walks are spotless, but every minute or so he advances the broom another foot, punching its bristles into the gray surface as if his job is not to keep the path clean but punish it for unmentionable crimes against humanity. Others sweep, rake, and supervise. Two or three trustees have no apparent duties. They are at their ease, talking and smoking. A lethargy, a stilted slow-motion heaviness stylizes their gestures. It’s as if they inhabit a different element, as if their bodies are enfolded in a dreamy ether or trapped at the bottom of the sea. I watch the prisoners watch the kids mount the steps. No outward signs betray what the men are thinking but I can feel them appraising, measuring. Through the prisoners’ eyes I see the kids as sexual objects. Clean, sleek bodies. Young, smooth, and supple. The coltish legs and high, muscley butts of my nieces. The boys’ long legs and slim hips. They are handsome children, a provocative banner waved in front of men who must make do with their own bodies or the bodies of other men. From the vantage point of the blue-uniformed trustees on the ground, the double staircase and the landing above are a stage free-world people must ascend. An auction block, an inspection stand where the prisoners can sample with their hungry eyes the meat moving in and out of prison.

But I don’t have their eyes. Perhaps what they see when the kids climb the steps are their own lost children, their sons and daughters, their younger brothers and sisters left behind in the treacherous streets. Not even inside the walls yet and I can sense the paranoia, the curtain of mistrust and suspicion settling over my eyes. Except for the car jockey and a runner outside the guards’ kiosk, all the trustees in the yard are black, black men like me, like you. In spite of knowing better, I can’t shake the feeling that these men are different. Not just different. Bad. People who are dangerous. I can identify with them only to the extent that I own up to the evil in myself. Yeah. If I was shut away from the company of women, I’d get freaky. Little kids, alley cats, anything got legs and something between them start to looking good to me. Yeah. It’s a free show when wives and mamas tippy-tap up them steps. And I’d be right there leaning on my broom taking it all in. I don’t want to feel angry or hostile toward the prisoners but I close up the space between myself and my two women, glad they’re both looking good and glad they’re both wearing slacks.

It’s crazy. It’s typical of the frame of mind visiting prison forces on me. I have trouble granting the prisoners a life independent of mine, I impose my terms on them, yet I want to meet their eyes. Plunge into the depths of their eyes to learn what’s hidden there, what reservoirs of patience and pain they draw from, what sustains them in this impossible place. I want to learn from their eyes, identify with their plight, but I don’t want anyone to forget I’m an outsider, that these cages and walls are not my home. I want to greet the prisoners civilly as I would if we passed each other outside, on Homewood Avenue. But locks, bars, and uniforms frustrate the simplest attempts at communication; the circumstances under which we meet inform me unambiguously that I am not on Homewood Avenue, not speaking to a fellow citizen. Whether or not I acknowledge that fact I’m ensnared by it. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I’m not wearing funny blue clothes. I walked into this zoo because I chose to; I can return home and play with these children, make love to my woman. These privileges, which in my day-to-day blindness I often don’t even count as privileges, are as embarrassing to me, as galling in this prison context as the inmates’ state of drastic deprivation must be to them. Without speaking a word, without having ever seen each other before, we know too much about each other. Our rawest, most intimate secrets are exposed, there’s no room for small talk. We can’t take our time and proceed in the gradual give-and-take, willed unveiling natural to human interaction. This place where we meet one another is called the slammer and sure as shit it slams us together.

People don’t so much meet as explode in each other’s faces. I say “Hi” to a tall guy who looks like somebody I might have played ball with once. He wasn’t anybody I knew but he could have been. One ballplayer knows every other ballplayer anyway, so I said “Hi.” Got back no hint of recognition. Nothing saying yes or no or maybe in his black face. The basketball courts where I sweated and he sweated, the close scores, the impossible shots, the chances to fly, to be perfect a second or two, to rise above the hard ground and float so time stands still and you make just the right move before your sneakers touch down again. None of that. No past or future we might have shared. Nothing at all. A dull, hooded “Hey, man” in reply and I backed off quickly.

Are the steps up to the porch landing iron or wood or concrete? I can’t recall. I’ll check next time. I feel them now, narrow, metal, curving like a ship’s spiral ladder. My feet ring against latticed rungs. I can peer through the winding staircase to the ground. People can look up between the rungs at me. The first violation of privacy. Arranged so that the prisoners are party to it. One privilege conferred on the trustees is this opportunity to greet free-world people first. Form a casual gaundet of eyes outsiders must endure. Behind the prisoners’ eyes may be nothing more than curiosity, perhaps even gratitude toward anybody willing to share a few hours with a man inside. Envy. Concern. Indifference. Any or all of these; but my ignorance, the insecurity bred by the towering walls incite me to resent the eyes.

I don’t enjoy being seen entering or leaving the prison. Enormous stores of willpower must be expended pretending it doesn’t exist. For the hour or so of the visit I want to forget what surrounds us, want to free myself and free you from the oppressive reality of walls, bars, and guards. And other prisoners. I resent them. And need them. Without them it wouldn’t be a prison. In the back of my mind I rely on the other prisoners to verify the mistake committed in your case. Some of these guys are bad, very bad. They must be. That’s why prisons exist. That’s why you shouldn’t be here. You’re not like these others. You’re my brother, you’re like me. Different.

A brother behind bars, my own flesh and blood, raised in the same houses by the same mother and father; a brother confined in prison has to be a mistake, a malfunctioning of the system. Any other explanation is too incriminating. The fact that a few twists and turns of fate could land you here with the bad guys becomes a stark message about my own vulnerability. It could easily be me behind bars instead of you. But that wouldn’t make sense because I’m not bad like the bad guys for whom prisons are built. The evil in others defines your goodness, frees me. If it’s luck or circumstance, some arbitrary decision that determines who winds up behind prison bars, then good and evil are superfluous. Nobody’s safe. Except the keepers, the ones empowered to say You go to the right. You go to the left. And they’re only safe as long as they’re keepers. If prisons don’t segregate good from evil, then what we’ve created are zoos for human beings. And we’ve given license to the keepers to stock the cages.

Once, on a previous visit, waiting an hour through a lock-in and countdown for you to be released to the visitors’ lounge, I was killing time on the porch of the visitors’ annex, resting my elbows on the stone railing, daydreaming at the river through the iron spears of the fence. An inmate called up to me. “You Faruq’s brother, ain’t you?” The man speaking was tall and broad-shouldered, a few years younger than you. His scarred head was shaved clean. He carried extra weight in soft pads on his hips, his belly, his cheeks. Like a woman, but also like the overweight lions in Highland Park Zoo.

I thought, Yes. Robby Wideman’s my brother. Then I said, “Faruq is my brother,” and expected more from the prisoner, but he’d turned back to the prisoners beside him, smoking, staring at nothing I could see.

A few minutes before, I’d noticed two men jogging along the river. I recognized their bright orange running shorts later as they hustled past me up the steps into the prison. Both greeted me, smiling broadly, the sort of unself-conscious, innocuous smiles worn by Mormon missionaries who periodically appear at our door in Laramie. Young, clean-cut, all-American white faces. I figured they had to be guards out for exercise. A new breed. Keepers staying in shape. Their friendly smiles said we’d be delighted to stay and chat with you awhile if we weren’t needed elsewhere. I thought of the bland, empty stare of the man who had recognized me as Faruq’s brother. Somebody had extinguished the light in his eyes, made him furtive, scared him into erecting a wall around his brown skin, trained him to walk and talk like a zombie. The healthy, clean sweat sheen on the runners’ suntanned brows and lean muscled shoulders made me hate them. I wanted to rush after them. Smash them out of their dream of righteousness.