Aunt Gloria looked so pathetic, her wig in curlers, heading back into the night with her suitcase. Dad took her and Ralston Jr. both to South Parkway and left Uncle Ralston no choice. While Uncle Ralston was putting the chain on the front door, Dad used his keys to unlock the back door. Aunt Loretta hardly left her room once her mad son and unhappy daughter-in-law turned up. Dad got a succession of janitors to move in. Mrs. Williams cooked and the asylum was complete. Ralston Jr. and Aunt Gloria lived mostly with his parents for the next twenty years.
Mom was strict about not discussing in front of Cello, Rhonda, or Ronald what we knew would upset them. But the morning after they’d come, smelling of smoke and hysteria, clutching pillowcases of beloved, petty possessions, nobody had to say anything to me. I could read minds that breakfast.
“So you’re sure Ralston set fire to the apartment on purpose,” Francesca said, standing by Dad’s bed.
Mom and Dad exchanged a look and began to play thumbs.
I explained to her that the riot in Newark that summer excited Ralston Jr. Solomon asked me what made me think I could say that, given that I was ten years old in the Summer of Love. He and his bride were healthy and camera-ready. I wanted to lie, to bring in the perverse, to say that Ralston Jr. used to beat off to the CBS Evening News, that Solomon hadn’t been at the Eagle those miserable summers. But I was officially as well fucked as my older brother and dropped my voice to say, “Think about it.”
* * *
The last syllable was scarcely out of his mouth when his dearest little friend got up and chose Ascyltus as his lover. Thunderstruck by this verdict, he fell on the bed. He would have laid violent hands on himself, like an executioner, if he hadn’t begrudged his rival that victory.
* * *
They were disappointed in my books, Duallo and Uwe. To which era did I belong? I looked over my shoulder in the Co-op bookstore when I was reading Fanon’s case study from 1932 about the woman from Madagascar who only wanted a relationship with a white man. I had not wanted to be in West Berlin with those sorts of books and questions.
Maybe that was why I really lost it in a house meeting about the bookstore selling Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which to them was a classic from the black American revolution of the 1960s but to me had nasty things to say about gay black men wanting to have babies by white men and the rape of white women as Cleaver’s personal retribution for the Vietnam War.
One woman framed the argument that Cleaver was not, as an oppressed man, an evolved man. I shot Afer a look that he didn’t want to acknowledge but couldn’t help but agree with. And this was the woman who, I heard, had decreed that she would not allow the Co-op to stock the memoirs of working-class-traitor terrorists or waifs who hung around Bahnhof Zoo, overdosed, survived, and then starred in films about their self-destruction.
I didn’t hear Lucky rise to introduce his motion. He wanted to address the subject of blasphemy and that book.
The house leader said we had no copies to sell and no plans to order copies from the London publishers. The Co-op would wait for the German translation.
The mother of his children went back to her oven. A few others made to leave the crowded café. I had to laugh at Co-op members like Afer, who enjoyed telling the stray customers we got in that part of town at that hour that we were closed.
Lucky had tried some of us already, deploring news of bookstore bombings in California while saying that it was very human that faith, when insulted, moved the faithful to act in defense of faith. I hadn’t thought of Lucky as Muslim or in the least observant. He hadn’t kept Ramadan last year, as far as I could tell.
I told Lucky that maybe I hadn’t made a motion, but I still had the floor. The house leader backed me up.
A girl with red pigtails who could repair any bicycle brought to her said that we were not the Bundestag. She wore black boots, even in summer, had them on the back of the chair in front of her, but most emphatically was not a lesbian. I stayed clear of her. Alma told me that a while back she gave Alma a black eye when Alma said that the redhead’s boyfriend was petit bourgeois, not proletarian, because his family had a butcher’s shop. The redhead was saying that every time they called for a free discussion, the house leader appointed himself police of that discussion.
I made a motion that the one copy in the original English by Eldridge Cleaver that was on sale be withdrawn and the house leader by way of restatement yelled it out for me. Duallo wasn’t present, but I thought I should be doing my own yelling. I opened my arms wide, like Frederick Douglass, and intoned that Cleaver once had a beautiful wife but he had become a Mormon and a Republican, signs that he had been a fraud in waiting, and Koh-op Hah-ee had to leave him behind, in the wet dust, as had his wife.
I felt some amazed eyes on me. Sometimes the house leader translated what he thought the English-shy among them had not understood fully. I waited.
Yao stood and raised his arm, stepping forward. The house leader acknowledged him. The redhead barked that he should just talk and forget recognition.
Yao asked me to have the patience to let him point out to me that Soul on Ice was first published twenty years ago. He could verify for me that twenty years was a long time, because he had not seen his mother, had not been back to Ghana, in twenty years. He was reluctant to say such things to me, but we were brothers in intellectual progressiveness, which he had understood the Co-op to consider among its foundation principles. Therefore, he had to ask if Europe did not do funny things to the black man.
I’d been depressed on the fourth anniversary of my having gone into rehab. I was sober except for the return of menthol cigarettes and lukewarm coffee. In the café, I had poured the occasional late morning glass of white wine for Lotte and still not asked for its new phone number.
But I knew that after the house meeting I would be back in the kitchen with Afer and some others, then upstairs with Afer and his girlfriend, then in my room, with me, my menthol, and little mouse droppings of hash, waiting for Duallo, whom I’d not seen in three days. I’d not been to the AA meeting in Dahlem since we met.
How else, Yao continued, could I, a black man, want to ban a book written by another black man. He moved closer and was breathing hard, struggling, I feared, with his own question of identity, whether he was a healer or a basher. I didn’t know how to stand. Yao placed his hands on his back and talked to me with his chin.
I did understand, did I not, that I was saying such things in Berlin, where in living memory books had been burned. Maybe an American, even an unwanted black-skinned American, held on to being an American, because for the American that rainy day always came. But for him, and for many of his brothers, their presence in West Berlin was a political solution in which the tragic personal destinies that had brought them to this city could be overcome.
I withdrew my motion. Yao got handshakes as he took his seat, his tribal stool. My face was hot. What year of grammar school or high school had I not metaphorically pissed myself in front of the entire class. To be back in school, with those feelings, as though I’d been beamed, made me consider that maybe the AA Big Book, which I looked down on because it was not great literature, knew more than I did about alcoholism and drug addiction.
Lucky said that the arrogance of Europe belittled the beliefs of millions. I hadn’t assigned religious feelings to anyone I lived with. I thought I saw homesickness in Lucky’s insistence on bringing up a subject that people were allergic to, that and maybe weariness with his invisibility in West Berlin.