In the years we were together I wrote four books of poems, two books of essays, two edited collections, and countless essays and talks. I taught hundreds of young people African American literature and poetry, directed a poetry center, and chaired an African American studies department. He made over eight hundred paintings, countless photographs and photo collages, and ran two restaurants. Of the plans that did not come through we wrote menus for other restaurants, plans for a downtown New Haven arts center, a school for the arts in Eritrea, a bed-and-breakfast on the Hudson River, a play based on the life of the magician Black Herman. Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.
In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.
Eleven
For years we spoke of preparing the Feast of the Seven Fishes. We talked to people who we knew had cooked their version of the feast. And so we finally did it, with Amy and Joanne and their children Benjamin and Marina, a family dear to us. Amy is a first-generation Italian American. She and Ficre spoke Italian to each other with gusto and joy. He sang to Marina a song that Amy remembered from her childhood, “Marina Marina,” in his sweet voice that brought her to tears. “Marina, Marina,” he sang, sweet bells. “Mi sono innamorato di Marina / una ragazza mora ma carina.” Brown-haired, beautiful Marina, “una ragazza mora.”
We prepared and indeed we feasted. Cold seafood salad was the only thing we purchased, from a Pugliese market in North Haven. I made linguine con le vongole and white bean and tuna bruschetta. Ficre seared a large diver scallop for each of us and placed it in a freshly made salsa in the shell. I fried flounder so crisp it curled; Ficre never fried—“that’s what your people do,” he’d say, and we’d laugh. He ate that yummy fish. Anchovies in Caesar salad counted, we figured. And the final fish was Ficre’s tuna, peppered, seared, and placed in strips on a bed of arugula and chopped tomatoes and a thin ribbon of balsamic vinegar reduction.
Each course left us silent with rapture. The children all said it was the best Christmas ever. Everyone loved their gifts. Amy gave Ficre fine Italian-made socks in salmon, cantaloupe, and shamrock green, which he preserved in the box they came in, waiting for the right occasion.
Twelve
Ficre thought Solo and Simon should have a special ritual for his thirteenth birthday, and so he asked each to imagine a journey they’d like the family to take with them. “I want to take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul!” said Simon the younger, and so that trip became part of the family anticipatory fantasy, despite the fact that we weren’t even sure if the Orient Express still ran. After characteristic deliberation, Solo declared that he wanted us to drive cross-country.
We planned and planned for two years leading up to the summer of 2011, when Solo would turn thirteen. We worked and organized to take six weeks. And then, the June day came.
We rented a car, the Crown Vic, in Stamford, our mighty chariot for the journey. Single-pump gas stations in the South. Peaches. Every civil rights stop we could make. The Edmund Pettus Bridge; Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; the Lorraine Motel. George Washington Carver’s preserved laboratory at Tuskegee Institute. My grandparents’ birthplaces in Alabama; my great-grandparents’ gravestones there. The Navajo rodeo, Navajo anthem, Navajo flag, Navajo-land. The Navajo speeding ticket, which Ficre prized. We were too tired to stop at the Grand Canyon. The rainstorm in Mississippi as we drove to Memphis, here it rained horizontally and Ficre piloted us through. To our children’s vast amusement, we both rode the water slide at the Broadmoor in Colorado, the fancy hotel where I insisted we stay so that I could “revitalize” myself.
I had a gig in beloved Chicago, and the boys went to a White Sox game on the El while I read my poems.
We met friends. Kevin made us eat bacon dipped in peanut butter and Jennifer, fried pickles.
The Watts Towers, my holy place.
It was too hot to hike in Joshua Tree National Park, too hot to sleep in Palm Springs.
Hilarious Vegas, where we had lunch with a play-uncle of mine who is a singer there, and he met my children for the first time.
I argued like a grifter for a better hotel room in Santa Monica and we lived in the very lap of luxury.
The day in Santa Monica when we rented bikes and rode to Venice Beach in the sunshine. We zoomed on our separate bikes together, stopped to go to an actual freak show where a bearded woman greeted us at the door, and a man lay down on a bed of broken glass, and the children were growing and happy and free and we were using our bodies, and the ocean was beside us, and later we would eat fish tacos, and watch people dance to disco music and roller-skate, and then a drumming circle of about a hundred played on the beach as the sun set. This was the most perfect four hours of happiness in my life.