The Light of the World: A Memoir
Elizabeth Alexander
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For Solomon and Simon, who walk their father’s walk
“There is light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness.”
—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THOMAS
“O beauty, you are the light of the world!”
—DEREK WALCOTT, “THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD”
“… the light insists on itself in the world”
—LUCILLE CLIFTON
“THE LIGHT THAT CAME TO LUCILLE CLIFTON”
I
“LAST NIGHT ON EARTH”
One
The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love. “The queen died and then the king died” is a plot, wrote E. M. Forster in The Art of the Novel, but “The queen died and then the king died of grief” is a story.
It begins on a beautiful April morning when a man wakes exhausted and returns to sleep in his beloved thirteen-year-old son’s trundle bed, declaring, “This is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in!” Or it begins when the wife says goodbye to the man a few hours later, walking in front of his car switching her hips a bit, a blown kiss as she heads to her office and he continues on to his painting studio.
Or the story begins as he packs a tote bag with the usual slim thermos of strong coffee made in an Italian stovetop moka pot, a larger thermos of cold water, two tangerines, a package of Nat Sherman MCD cigarettes, and a plastic sack of raw almonds. The tote is astral blue and printed with Giotto angels. Off to his studio for a day of painting, then home—as if nothing extraordinary has happened, when in fact he has been envisioning worlds—hanging the Giotto bag on a hook in the mudroom and changing out of his paint-splattered jeans into gym shorts and a T-shirt for yoga in the family room or a run on the treadmill in the basement.
Soon the two children will walk down Edgehill Road from the bus stop like burros under their knapsacks, and his wife will prepare dinner while listening to Thelonious Monk’s evocative open intervals and sipping from a glass of white wine that he’s opened and poured for her. “My frosty white?” she’d ask a few times a week, and he’d chuckle and say, “Right away, my love. Chop chop.” They enjoyed playing, and acting out boy-girl courtliness. The thirteen-year-old does his homework and the twelve-year-old practices his drumming. The man’s home life is the unchanging beautiful same, so anything could occur in the painting studio each day.
I am the wife. I am the wife of fifteen years. I am the plumpish wife, the pretty wife, the loving wife, the smart wife, the American wife. I am eternally his wife.
Perhaps the story begins with the three dozen lottery tickets he bought two days before he died, which I discovered weeks later, when they fluttered out of the pages of one of the many books he was reading.
Or it begins with his surprise fiftieth birthday party, four days before he died, and the spoken tributes from his loved ones, and strawberries and pancakes and music the next morning.
Or it began when I met him, sixteen years before. That was always a good story: an actual coup de foudre, a bolt of lightning, love at first sight. I felt a visceral torque, I would tell people, a literal churn of my organs: not butterflies, not arousal; rather, a not-unpleasant rotation of my innards, as never before. Lightning struck and did not curdle the cream but instead turned it to sweet, silken butter. Lightning turned sand into glass.
The story began in the winter of 1961, when two quietly mighty women were each pregnant, one in Asmara, Eritrea, and the other in Harlem, USA; one with her sixth child, one with her first.
The East African son would arrive on March 21, 1962, the most hallowed day of the zodiac. It is the beginning and the end of the astrological calendar, and so it is said that children born on March 21 are ancient souls who possess the wonder and innocence of newborns.
The American child, a girl, would come on May 30, into the chatter and buzz of Gemini, in Gotham.
Two