The museum catalog said that Goya, when he made the Caprichos, was fascinated by a Swiss theorist named Johann Kaspar Lavater, who insisted that an individual’s moral nature is shaped by his physical features. A “degenerate” lower jaw was a sign of “brutal corruption”; a “slavish devotion to pure reason” could lead to a “warped and bony forehead.” In this, I heard echoes of Bitter’s bayou superstitions, as well as more sinister strains of genetic engineering and racial typing. Still, for all their horror, Goya’s sketches were madly funny. My favorite was a drawing of two stumbling sleepwalkers hoisting braying asses — I get it! I thought. Mans donkeylike behavior! I know this stuff!
In a history class that year, I learned that Spain, where Goya lived, was a blend of both European and African influences, a bastard mix, a slumgullion. Maybe that’s where Goya’s turmoil came from — why I was so attracted to his work. I liked history classes so much, I switched majors. This didn’t please Mama or my stepdad, who disdained the “impractical” liberal arts. By this time, tired of the Tri Delt house, bored with three-chord rock and roll — bored with myself — I began, at last, to think once more of the past, to smell, in memory, the bayou’s sweet, compelling rot. I pressed Mama again about our flight from Houston, her aversion to blacks, the blackness in herself. I wanted to know about Sarah Morgan. One day her husband Dale yelled at me to “leave your poor mother alone, can’t you? Christ, you’d think you’d want to live in Queen City”—a poor, inner-city neighborhood — “instead of enjoying the good things here. Your daddy couldn’t have given you a life like this. You know that, don’t you?”
Aggravated by Mama’s silence, I sought my answers at school. Sarah Morgan. Insubordinate soldiers. Eventually, these threads led me to the Houston race riot. I became obsessed with it and would have remained a history major if the professors hadn’t discouraged me. Women weren’t really welcome in the profession. I saw this in subtle games of intellectual one-upsmanship at socials. Men competed for the big prizes — the American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal — animals fighting over meat. African American history barely surfaced on campus — the field’s few black scholars had earned their degrees at obscure institutions and were forced to spend most of their careers overworked in the classroom, woefully underpaid.
When I proposed writing on Houston history for my favorite teacher, he looked at me skeptically. “There’s no collective memory in that city,” he said finally. “It’s been in such a hurry to grow, ever since its founding, it hasn’t bothered to retain its past. It only cares about Tomorrow. I’m afraid ‘Houston history’ is an oxymoron.”
He was right. Records from Houston’s past had often been sloppily kept, misplaced, eaten by bugs, burned up, thrown out. The city’s heat and humidity were natural enemies of paper, where much of history resides. In researching the place, I kept running into silence. It was eerily like talking to Mama.
In the end, I stuck with business and marketing, reading history on my own in the Goya room, surrounded not by short-ribbed TV beauties, but by humpbacks, birdmen, cannibals eating angels, children with hoary, feathered bodies. Slumgullions, all. I felt at ease with them. Happy. Since my freshman English class, Ralph Ellison’s blues-prose had spun, flashing, in my head, and I returned to him now, this time studying his essays, his concern that “practically missing from America …since Huckleberry Finn” was a “search for images of black and white fraternity.”
One day I ran across this phrase: “The American Negro [has an] impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going-under-ground.’” The words brought tears to my eyes, unexpectedly. I looked up at one of Goya’s grotesques, a tortured creature writhing on the earth, and this time, instead of seeing myself, I recognized poor Mama, running, frightened, stumbling from her past.
On our visits back to Freedmen’s Town, she walked with me down magnolia-shaded roads or past pecan trees on the far side of the cemetery. She didn’t talk much but seemed content to be with me. Web-worms spun silk, patterned like musical staves, among the leaves. On the hottest days, worms dropped, shriveled, from the limbs: old lady fingers. People crushed them underfoot, accidentally, until the walks were slick with chili-like paste. I didn’t mind. I loved being with Mama.
Silk waves in the oaks today in front of Ariyeh’s school. The neighborhood has been bulldozed and burned to near-extinction. An old man in a hooded jacket — he must be broiling! — pushes an empty shopping cart past the campus. On the playground, three girls stop to whisper about him, staring and laughing, then resume their game. Closer, I see they’re using TV cable as a jump rope. Garbage bags flap in broken windows on the building’s second floor. An inspection sheet taped to the wall near a boarded-up basement door says, “NO ACCESS TO BUILDING HERE,” and the remaining safety form is blank. A third- or fourth-grade boy saunters past me, puffing on a plastic inhaler, wrestling a backpack almost as big as he is. As they skip rope, the girls chant, “SSI, SSI / Give it to Granny / So Granny won’t die!” I’m astonished. SSI is a federal program for the sick and disabled, and just about everybody — including these laughing girls, it seems — knows it’s worthless. Last month, a woman who mistook my office for one of the social service outlets burst in, yelling, “How sick you gotta be to get on SSI? I’ve had AIDS for six months now, and the bastards still won’t cut me a check!”
The school’s main door gives me trouble. It’s metal, painted green, and sticks near the uppermost hinge. I tug hard, imagining how difficult it must be for a child to budge this thing. What would happen in a fire? Fungus, old paper in the halls. Kids shuffle through them, quieter than I would have anticipated, gloomy even. This morning, before I left the shed, Uncle Bitter told me, “Three kids disappeared there lately, over a span of six weeks. Ain’t been found. Folks worried the Needle Men is back.”
In the sweltering front office I ask for Ariyeh. A big woman fanning her face with a Newsweek (“George W.’s Run for the White House”) points out a cracked, dirty window to a concrete courtyard about the size of a doctor’s waiting room. “There she is, eating her sandwich.” The woman she means is slender, long-armed, in a red dress. Dark as bookprint. I don’t recognize my cousin until … yes, yes. Oval mouth. Small nose, like a thread spool. Talk about a remake!
At the courtyard entrance, a sign on the wall says NO SKATEBOARDING. Below it, someone has scribbled No Guns.
Ariyeh’s surprising appearance, along with Bitter’s information about my family, has made me shy. We’re strangers now, really. Not even real cousins. I’m slow to approach. “Excuse me,” I say. “Ariyeh?”
She looks up, startled, and knows me immediately. A pleasure-twitch crosses her lips, tamped down instantly by anger, hurt, resentment? Who has she become in the last fifteen years? What burdens does she carry? “T,” she says softly, looking away, setting her cheese sandwich on a square of wax paper in her lap.
“Look at you. You’re beautiful,” I say.
Wry smile. “Not fat, you mean. I hit a growth spurt around fourteen, sprouted like a dandelion. No more Ugly Duckling.”