Part 8 (2/2)

Buy a soda from the vending machine as the visitor instructions permit. Hand it to him. Sit back down.

Wait for the time to be up. When the time is up, walk to the door. (Note: You may feel oily, dark, in need of a Brillo pad to scour off everything that has come toward you in these hours, and the feeling may be physical and metaphorical.) Drive north through the Great Dismal Swamp. Keep driving. Drive home.

Receive the hundreds of pages of letters he sends over the next six months. Save them for a while. Keep thinking of her. (That part is not hard.) Write from her son's perspective. Write it as fiction. Write from her perspective. Listen.

Ask. Where are her words ?

Shred his.

Wait several years. Attend a wedding. Be sociable. Hear the charming man next to you talk about his four children, his wife, that his father killed his mother when he was small, his career, his hopes for his children, his love for the grandmother who raised him. Talk to him about family and fun and food and New Orleans. Laugh. Dance with your man.

Hear her now. Hear Love life. Hear Love especially those who have no need for the word ”lugubrious.” Hear That's it.

Say back What really happened is your life.

Rude Am I in My Speech.

Caryl Phillips.

FROM Salmagundi.

PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING MOMENT in the first act of Shakespeare's Oth.e.l.lo occurs when the soldier is asked by the Duke of Venice to respond to the accusation that he has ”beguiled” Brabantio's daughter, Desdemona, away from the protection and safety of her father's house. The soldier is an outwardly confident man, full of pride and bombast, and hugely aware of his celebrity in Venice. He addresses the Duke. ”Rude am I in my speech,” he says, then spins a masterfully persuasive narrative full of lyrical eloquence which the Duke acknowledges would have ensnared his own daughter too. The poised, silver-tongued soldier is vindicated and the play can proceed. What is firmly established in this first act is that Oth.e.l.lo is an outsider both racially and socially. In this thoroughly demarcated Venetian world where Michael Ca.s.sio is simply ”a Florentine,” the ”old black ram,” although he claims to be descended from ”men of royal siege,” is regarded as little more than an ”extravagant and wheeling stranger.” For the full length of the first act, what Shakespeare does not allow us to see is that for all Oth.e.l.lo's public success there is at the center of his personality a kernel of self-doubt, a tight knot of anxiety, which is eventually exploited by his ancient Iago. During this first act the soldier appears to be in control. He plays games, protesting that he has a clumsy tongue even though his language betrays no hint of rudeness or foreign taint. If Oth.e.l.lo possesses any self-doubt, or inner discomfort, its origins are not rooted in language. What if he had begun his mellifluous speech with, ”Rude am I in my visage”? Would this self-a.s.sured black migrant to Europe have had the confidence to stand before the Duke of Venice and play fearlessly with notions of ident.i.ty and belonging that are rooted in race as opposed to language, or would this be to trespa.s.s too close to the source of his well-hidden self-doubt?

Almost ten years ago, I arranged to meet my father at lunchtime in a hotel in Manchester. The night before I had given a reading at a local bookshop, and that afternoon I was planning to move on to Liverpool and give another reading at the university. My father lives maybe an hour away from Manchester, and so this seemed an opportune moment to get together. What made the meeting unusual was the fact that we had not seen or spoken with each other for some years. I came down into the hotel lobby a little early, but there he was, already sprawled out on a sofa and watching the news on the television. He saw me and stood up. I was glad to see him. He had not changed much, and we hugged and I suggested that we go to another hotel around the corner, which had a nicer restaurant. There were very few people in the place and the hostess seated us and gave us our menus. She asked if we would like a drink to start with. My father ordered a Scotch and I asked for a gla.s.s of Sauvignon Blanc, and, having informed us of the specials, the hostess left us alone. Five minutes later a waitress arrived with our drinks. As she withdrew we raised our gla.s.ses and clinked, and then I sipped and grimaced. My father asked me if there was a problem and I said that the wine was not Sauvignon Blanc. It tasted like Chardonnay. I signaled to the waitress and then I saw a flicker of panic pa.s.s across my father's face. He asked me if I couldn't drink it. I said, ”Why, it's not what I ordered.” The waitress came over and I explained the situation. She shrugged her shoulders and took up my gla.s.s. There was no apology, but there was no surliness either as she disappeared from view. My father remained quiet and I could see that he was uncomfortable. For a few moments I made inane conversation; at last the waitress returned with the new gla.s.s of wine and I tasted it. Better, I thought, so I nodded and thanked her and she left us alone. However, this incident caused the atmosphere between father and son to become strained.

First-generation migrants to Europe, from wherever they may originate, have to learn quickly how to read the new society in order to successfully navigate their way forward. Sometimes this involves learning when to remain quiet, and somewhat compliant, and not risk causing offense. When West Indians first arrived in England in the 1950s, countless pamphlets were thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English. They were instructed that they must line up at bus stops in an orderly fas.h.i.+on, and not keep working when their fellow laborers were on a tea break, and it was suggested that they should try to join a trade union, and perhaps they should not bring food that smelled ”foreign” to work. In common with many immigrants, they were being taught how to tread carefully, the unspoken contract being that in time they would learn the rules and become familiar with how the society worked; so much so that one day they might be considered domesticated. Whether they would ever become fully fledged insiders was not discussed, but for many first-generation migrants this was not something that was necessarily desired. The hope on both sides was for some vestige of tolerance and respect.

There are, of course, two places where new immigrants can find some relief from these anxieties of belonging. First, at home with their families, where the rules are of their own making and no local person can prevent them from being kings and queens in their own castles. Behind closed doors they can cook their own food, listen to whatever music takes their fancy, and curse the locals in whatever tongue or dialect they choose. And then of course there is the world of the pub, or the club, or the cafe, where immigrants gather together socially and over a drink compare notes with others of their own tribe. The home and the social gathering place const.i.tute zones of psychological relief for immigrants. In such s.p.a.ces one doesn't have to be called Sam or Son, or take aggressive orders from ignorant people half one's age. In the kingdom of the home, or in the citadel of the club, first-generation migrants are free to be whoever they imagine, or remember, themselves to be, and there is no expectation that they should perform the shapes.h.i.+fting dance that immigrants often have to execute in order to safely negotiate a pa.s.sage from sunup to sundown. Of course, the more successful the immigrant, the more difficult it can be to keep in touch with the ”club.” Upon a.s.suming a white-collar job as a foreman, or an executive role in a company, the rules become more complex, for there are now men and women above you and men and women below you, and with the job comes a salary increase and perhaps a move to a new neighborhood where there are less of you and more of them. To keep contact with fellow migrants one has to now travel further, both physically and psychologically.

During the first, Venetian act of Shakespeare's play, before the action moves off to Cyprus, it is clear to us that Oth.e.l.lo, this ”extravagant and wheeling stranger,” is a man who is a long way from home. In Venice he is an exotic celebrity, and as such the Duke is inclined to overlook the social and cultural transgression of not only an interracial marriage but a secret one, therefore allowing Oth.e.l.lo to indulge in behavior that would almost certainly be frowned upon if attempted by a noncelebrity. This being the case, this extravagant stranger appears to be untroubled by the fact that he has recourse to neither home nor club as places to which he might retreat and recuperate from the daily fatigue of living a performative life, and he appears content to veer dramatically between rhetorical swagger and self-deprecating bl.u.s.ter like a kite snapping in the wind. Apparently he feels that his success is such that there is no need for him to be aware of the unwritten Venetian rule book which tells him that he must line up in an orderly fas.h.i.+on for a gondola, and don't even think about cooking chickpeas or couscous, and whatever you do don't mess with the local ladies, especially the t.i.tled ones. Our celebrity migrant considers himself above and beyond such restrictive nonsense. By the end of Act One the newly married man truly believes that he has crossed over into full acceptance, but the truth is, without family or peer group, and without societal knowledge born of vigilance and judicious interaction, he is incapable of making sound decisions about something as basic as knowing who to trust. It soon becomes lamentably evident that, far from being in control of the situation and partic.i.p.ating as an insider, our black first-generation migrant to Europe is about as unmoored as any man can be.

My father is no Oth.e.l.lo. He may have polished up a few words and phrases here and there, and done a little studying of the dictionary, but to this day he remains admirably rude in speech. But then again he has never been a vital or essential cog in British life and occupied the role of supermigrant. What West Indian immigrant has? In fact, what immigrant has? As a first-generation migrant he has always been aware of the home and the club as zones of sanity in which he can be himself. Like most second-generation children, I have at times been puzzled and frustrated by his dependence upon one form or another of the ”club,” and irritated by the taciturn manner in which he often exercised his authority in the home; not that he was always wrong. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I remember one Sat.u.r.day night standing upstairs in front of the mirror and preparing myself to go out to the church discotheque. Eventually I ventured downstairs wearing tight blue nylon bellbot-toms, black platform shoes, a pink s.h.i.+rt with a huge collar that was trimmed in brown piping, and a black-and-white-checked jacket. My father was sitting at the kitchen table and he looked up at me over the top of his newspaper. He shook his head and said, ”Somebody tell you that s.h.i.+t matches?” The second generation was stepping out into England with a confidence and brashness that, in retrospect, could have used a little more of his cold water being poured upon it. It was his house and he was trying to tell me something about how to look and comport myself out there on the streets, like the time a year or two later when I pa.s.sed my driving test and he told me that I must be very careful if I was out driving at night with a white girl in the pa.s.senger seat. He warned me that I should be prepared to have the police stop and hara.s.s me for no other reason than the fact that I was with a white girl. Again he was pa.s.sing on knowledge which was meant both to help prepare me for life in England and to reaffirm who he was when in his own private sphere. I listened, and I a.s.sumed that my father knew what he was talking about, for at the time he had a white wife.

As a reader and a writer, I am interested in loneliness and isolation, and I have found myself returning time and time again to consider those who have suddenly realized themselves to be marooned. Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in that huge Chicago mansion, scared out of his mind and not knowing whether to stay put or flee; Ibsen's Oswald, recently returned to Norway with his body eaten away by disease and his mind racked with pain at the bleakness of his own country; James Baldwin's David, alone in a house in the South of France at precisely the time his lover, Giovanni, is about to be guillotined in Paris; Shusaku Endo's medical intern, Suguro, whose conscience begins to torment him as he remembers the past and finds himself increasingly detached from daily reality. However, I know of no character in literature more profoundly alone and isolated than Shakespeare's pioneer migrant Oth.e.l.lo, who, once he pa.s.ses beyond the imaginary security of his life in the great city of water, suddenly finds himself adrift with no son or daughter to measure his situation against, no peer group to bond with at the end of the day, no Venetian home to return to, and loving a local woman whom he eventually decides he cannot trust. No wonder he loses his mind.

Immigrants will continue to enter Europe, and initially they will be unsure of how to be an Italian, or how to be a Dane, or Irish or Greek. It takes many years for a first-generation migrant, of any race, to become socially confident, and perhaps, in the end, it is only those closest to them, the second generation, who can fully understand the price they pay as they grapple with self-doubt and attempt to hitch their fortune (and talent) to a new country. I am beginning to feel that witnessing and recording the predicament of the first generation is a responsibility, because by the time we reach the commendably brash third generation, a parental comment about one's dress, or how to be circ.u.mspect in the street, is likely to be met with a bemused and slightly disdainful ”What are you on about?” As the grandchildren enter fully and boldly into the country with not only the temerity of an Oth.e.l.lo but, crucially, armed with the social knowledge and understanding that the Venetian resident didn't have, or seem to desire, the kernel of self-doubt which speaks to either social standing or race is, in their lives, beginning to disappear. Nervous hesitation will once again be visited upon the next wave of first-generation migrants, wherever they might hail from, and to the list of potential sources of anxiety to be negotiated we might add religious belief. Rude am I in my speech. Rude am I in my visage. Rude am I in my faith. When I left my father in Manchester that lunchtime, and took the train to Liverpool, I began to think about first-generation diffidence, and again I reflected upon the supreme loneliness of the migrant to Venice, who also had a white wife, but it never occurred to him that the police were going to pull him over, until, of course, it was too late.

Lucky Girl.

Bridget Potter.

FROM Guernica.

IN 1962, I WAS NINETEEN, working in my first job, living in my first apartment, having s.e.x with my first real boyfriend. Michael was a tall, thick-haired Italian from the Bronx. For birth control, I was using fluffy pink foam from an aerosol can. I had heard about it from dark-banged, bespectacled Emily Perl in the television production office where I had my first job. I was the floater, filling in when a secretary went to lunch or the switchboard operator needed to go to the bathroom. Emily was a researcher and married. She used the foam as backup to her diaphragm. At the time it was illegal for a gynecologist to prescribe a diaphragm for a single woman, and I didn't have the nerve to lie. As for condoms, what little I knew of them was that they were disgusting, unreliable, and boys didn't like to use them anyway.

Emily Perl knew a single girl who had been buying the pink foam illicitly from a pharmacy on Madison Avenue and using it-no diaphragm-without a problem. It was a spermicide. When the white-coated pharmacist handed me the plain white box of contraband from beneath the counter I tried to ignore his knowing leer. Sperm killer sounded safe and safe is what I wanted to be.

I used the pink foam.

My period was late.

Historian Rickie Solinger in her book Wake Up Little Susie describes what it was like to have an unwanted pregnancy in 1962. The woman might be ”futilely appealing to a hospital abortion committee; being diagnosed as neurotic, even psychotic by a mental health professional; expelled from school (by law until 1972); unemployed; in a Salvation Army or some other maternity home; poor, alone, ashamed, threatened by the law.” There was also an acute social stigma attached to an unwed mother with an illegitimate child; maternity homes were frequently frightening and far away. All counseled adoption. The only alternatives were a shotgun wedding or an illegal abortion.

According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies. Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the Guttmacher Inst.i.tute, a respected international organization dedicated to s.e.xual and reproductive health, estimates that during the pre-Roe v. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In 1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher, since the majority went unreported.

Michael and I checked around for remedies. First we had a lot of energetic s.e.x, even though we were hardly in the mood. That didn't work. One night I sat in an extremely hot bath in my walk-up on Waverly Place while Michael fed me a whole quart of gin, jelly jar gla.s.s by jelly jar gla.s.s. In between my gulps, he refreshed the bath with boiling water from a saucepan on the crusty old gas stove. I got beet-red and nauseous. We waited. I threw up. Nothing more. Another night I ran up and down the apartment building's six flights of stairs, Michael waiting at the top to urge me to go back down and do it again.

On a Friday evening, I drank an overdose of castor oil. By midnight I had horrible cramps of the wrong kind in the wrong place.

When my period was a month late I gave up hoping for a false alarm and went to visit Emily Perl's gynecologist. His ground-floor office in a brownstone on a side street on the Upper East Side was genteel but faded. So was he, a short, stern old man with gla.s.ses perched on the top of his head and dandruff flakes on his gray suit jacket. As I explained my problem, he shook his head from side to side in obvious disapproval of the loose behavior that was the cause of my visit. He instructed me to pee in a jar. The test results, he said, would take two weeks.

At that time pregnancy testing involved injecting a lab rabbit with human urine and watching for its effects. I waited to hear if the rabbit died. I learned much later that all lab rabbits used for pregnancy tests died, autopsied to see the results. It was code.

My rabbit died.

Michael was Roman Catholic and at twenty-two was willing to get married but unenthusiastic. We could, he supposed, live with his parents in the Bronx. I didn't know what I wanted to do. My upper-cla.s.s English parents would have been appalled and, I was sure, unsupportive. Confused, ashamed, scared, and sad, I decided to try to get an abortion.

Try was the operative word. I asked the gynecologist for advice. He told me that the law prohibited him from helping me in any way, but he offered to check me later for infection. The idea of infection alarmed me but I thought his gesture was nice.

I'd heard that after twelve weeks the procedure became extremely dangerous. So I had four weeks left to borrow money, find a way to do it, and get it done.

Emily Perl knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been taken care of by a woman in an apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. When Michael and I arrived, she put the chain on the inside of the door and peeped through the crack. She let me in but demanded that Michael wait in the lobby. The room was dark, overheated, and smelled of boiled cabbage. I glimpsed a big Victorian wood-framed red velvet couch and a round oak pedestal table through the dinge. In her fifties, the woman had an Eastern European accent, suspiciously black hair, and smeary scarlet lipstick. She was curt.

She would ”pack” my uterus and send me home, where I must rest. For a day or two. When I started to bleed I must return, and she would take care of it. What would she put inside me? I asked clumsily. ”Stoff,” she replied. Where would she ”take care” of it? I asked. She pointed to a door. ”In ze udder room.” I must ”svear” not go to a doctor or a hospital. I understood the chilling threat. ”It's nowting,” she said. ”If you wanna now is fine. Five hunnerd dollars. Cash.”

My rent was $60 a month. I earned $60 a week, $47 after taxes. I could barely make it Friday to Friday. I thanked her and fled. There had to be a cheaper, safer way.

There was. Within a couple of days Emily Perl, born researcher, came up with the Angel of Ashland, Pennsylvania. Dr. Robert Spencer was a legend, a general pract.i.tioner inspired by compa.s.sion to perform, it is said, somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 illegal abortions over his sporadic career. His price was $50. He worked in a sterile environment with an anesthetist and used an orthodox medical procedure called dilation and curettage. What did that mean? I asked Emily. Opening and sc.r.a.ping, she told me. I was sorry I had asked. His clinic had been closed down by the law, but she gave me a contact number at a motel somewhere in Pennsylvania. I should say I wanted an appointment, saying simply that I needed a D & C. It was affordable, sane, and safe.

I called. The woman who answered told me Dr. Spencer was unreachable, he would be unreachable for about five months. I pressed. I might even have cried. The woman in the motel somewhere in Pennsylvania finally told me that he was in jail.

Emily's last suggestion was based on a rumor. There might be a place in the Santurce district of San Juan, Puerto Rico, called the Women's Hospital that would give an abortion. It might cost $250. She knew nothing more. I was becoming frantic. Michael was unable to do much more than hold my hand. I had two weeks left. I was on my own.

Sneaking into an empty office at work and locking the door, I picked up the phone. The overseas operator found the number and placed the call. The connection was crackly, and the man who answered neither confirmed nor denied that they would help. I asked if I would need more than $250. That might be okay, he said vaguely. I should come down if I wanted to know more. Not on a weekend, he warned.

I would go. I would need money for the airfare, money for a place to stay for a couple of nights, and money for the abortion. It would add up, I speculated, to about $500.

Michael offered to ask his father, a shoemaker with a repair store on Ca.n.a.l Street, but he couldn't tell him what he needed the money for, and he wasn't sure if his father would have it to lend. I had never asked my parents for money, and they had never offered it. If I did now, they would a.s.sume, rightly, that their prediction that I would get into some kind of dreadful trouble had come true. I couldn't face them. Emily Perl's husband was a book editor. They lived in an apartment with real draperies. They gave dinner parties at which they served wine in long-stemmed gla.s.ses. Maybe she had an extra $500. Borrow it from the office, she suggested. Bosses like their employees to feel obligated. They'll get it back by deducting it from your paycheck.

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