Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 11

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LATE ONE NIGHT the winter our children are nine and twelve, I settle on the green couch in the den of our rural New England farmhouse holding an old softback book in shaking hands. Its title is The Wrath of Chane, and the teaser copy promises “the most shocking portrayal of slavery ever written,” but the image under those words reveals a tale as old as time. There’s a tall, muscular black man trying to pull his wrists apart, but his chains don’t allow it. He’s got no shirt on and his pants are unbuttoned. A white woman in a yellow dress with carefully curled blonde hair clings to his arm and gazes up at his face. I keep looking at the author’s name and trying to pull out a memory from the distance. I know it’s one of my father’s pseudonyms, printed there on the cover of this thick piece of pulp, but I can’t remember ever hearing it spoken out loud. Tonight—with my family sleeping upstairs—I open it for the first time.

My father wrote this book, and I know very little about my father.

Right away I see the name of my mother’s mother penciled in the right-hand corner of the first page. It’s handwriting that brings back birthday cards and grocery lists, handwriting I haven’t seen since childhood. My father’s mother-in-law didn’t just keep this book he wrote, she marked it as hers. Laid claim to his work, even when it was slavery porn. Her tidy name in the corner of that brittle yellow page softens me to the book, softens me to my dad. It allows me to begin.

“The young black man sat for a long time within sight of the house of the overseer. It was almost morning when he first stirred, changing from a sitting to a kneeling position beneath the large cypress tree hung with Spanish moss like a shroud,” I read. These are the first words of my writer father’s I’ve ever read. “The chorus of spring stars was still loud in eulogy in the heavens,” I read. “Loud in eulogy.” I run my eyes over the phrase again, there at the bottom of this first page. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. I can do this, it is time to do this.

But then there are torn clothes. There is a “wide forehead.” There’s a “thick chest.” There is Chane, speechless and superhumanly strong. A slave with sex appeal.

His large black nostrils flared and his heart pumped fury through the veins Iwana had given him. The son of Iwana and the high medicine stood in the Louisiana night and felt a great pounding beneath his forehead and behind his eyes. He remembered the white woman who was asleep not fifty feet from where he stood and tasted the heavy saliva that was collecting on his tongue.

When Chane finds that woman, her “white fingers [run] over [his] coal black skin,” before he takes her head in his huge hand, “grasping it like a fruit” to “fling her to the ground by it.”

He is an animal, this man with a vaguely African-sounding mother. He is an animal, this man in Louisiana where the “high medicine” made him, and not a mortal father. I can’t understand why this man is shown to be an animal in these opening pages.

The white woman he’s come for doesn’t see yet that he’s here to kill her. She thinks he’s looking for something else. “She lifted her nightdress up to her thighs and said, ‘Gonna get me some poison ivy like as not, but it’s goin’ to be worth it, ain’t it, you?’” and I have to close down a memory that threatens to rise up—a story about a woman my father had sex with in the woods one night, how she became covered in a rash from poison ivy afterwards, how he wasn’t allergic to it—and I give my head a shake, remind myself why I’m here. Look back at the book.

He knelt, took her neck in one powerful hand and began to choke the amazed, half naked, throbbing woman. Her eyes swelled in her head, a strange small sound left her throat and when he stood up, still holding her by the neck, she was dragged up with him. Her nightdress fell, covering her body again. She shook violently for a moment and then died, a foot off the ground, held in the powerful grip of the infuriated slave.

AT FIRST I sit dumbstruck and wonder what my tidy WASP of a grandmother thought when she read her son-in-law’s words. How Joan McKenzie from Albany, New York, felt about writing her name in that book after all.

Then I wonder what it takes to dream up that violence. What parts of a person have to be accessible for him to reach in and find that. How the plot the author puts down on the page is informed by the contents of his heart.

I think about my family sleeping above me and put the book down. I climb the stairs and creep into first one kid’s room and then the other’s. I linger as long as I can, press my lips onto warm foreheads until their bodies shift and resettle. Stand in the hallway and listen to them breathe. Worry about what I have done, opening this door. About what I will tell them when they ask where they come from, who their grandfather was.

Then I climb into the bed I share with my husband and lie as still as possible. I don’t want to wake him, I don’t want to ask him to hold this truth with me, I don’t want to burden him with these fears. I lie as still as possible in the bed I share with my husband and wonder how my father’s imagination could have been so filled with racial stereotypes about couplings like my own. I lie as still as possible and think about how much I want to crawl out of my skin. Out of my marriage from the guilt I feel, because if this is who my father was, who am I?