Who was the saint who attracted birds? I ask Father Peter.
He answers, Saint Francis, who spread his arms like wings and a flock of birds landed there, doves, larks, sparrows, and owls. A crowd gathered and though they spoke many different languages, they all understood him. Saint Francis spoke Italian, but each of the listeners heard the Sermon of the Birds in their own language. Each bird repeated the words Saint Francis uttered, but each bird spoke in a different language so each listener could understand.
Yes, I say, that’s right, and I tell him a story from our family:
One day we all went to the chickadee forest in Cape Cod. I wasn’t too excited; I’m a city girl and don’t want birds coming close to me. As we wended deeper into the woods, Simon suddenly stood still on the path—he was only five—and stretched out his arms. Chickadees came and lit all over him, on his arms, on his shoulders, on his head. He stood very still and smiled, for what felt like a very long time, and the birds chittered in the quiet wood.
Then I told Father Peter how Simon had described heaven, having seen his father there.
Father Peter said, You and Ficre were blessed to be artists who take in the world that way, and so your closeness was sanctified. And your children were blessed to have you as parents. And your sons will always be blessed to have had their father. That will never change.
Then he said, Don’t ever let anyone guilt-trip you, or tamper with what you know of your sacred love.
We hug, and I leave without buying anything, having received the sermon I clearly needed. So what if I didn’t buy food, I thought. We’ll eat cereal for dinner tonight! I feel fully in possession of Father Peter’s words. The ones that shimmer I repeat to myself: sacred love.
Seventeen
May ends with my fiftieth birthday. I’d wanted to have a joint birthday party with Ficre, a hundredth-birthday party. In our New Haven neighborhood filled with old houses and intellectuals, people sometimes have hundredth-birthday parties for their houses, which feels very New England to me in a way that we are not. But the idea of our being one hundred together was magic.
I refuse to have my birthday. I’ll sit this one out, I repeat. But Joanne insists, you have to have a birthday, and she and Amy make a small party for me where we feast in their home with our children, my parents, Mark, Tracy, and Alondra, dance hard to the hip-hop songs the kids DJ, and then listen to a live chanteuse sing songs that make all the grown-ups cry. Joanne is right: you cannot stop your birthday from coming, so you might as well celebrate being alive.
I did not grow up in the black church, nor with the Negro spirituals. Now I understand them as never before. Their poetry feels pure and profound. I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here. I think of Frederick Douglass’s great words that I have taught countless times:
“I did not, when a slave, fully understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.… The remark in the olden time was not unfrequently made, that slaves were the most contented and happy laborers in the world, and their dancing and singing were referred to in proof of this alleged fact; but it was a great mistake to suppose them happy because they sometimes made those joyful noises. The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to aching hearts.”
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy, he famously wrote. Song raises and bubbles up as the only apt expression of this sorrow, the only possible bulwark against eclipsing grief.
I have not dreamed enough of Ficre because my subconscious is vigilant. I hope no one is fooled by my competence. The waters of sorrow continue to wash and wash.
The few safe zones are clear, as if infrared. Outside of those zones, there is free-fall.
The children are obsessed with stories in the sensationalist press of the coming zombie apocalypse, and flesh-eating creatures arisen from the dead. I brush it off but their beliefs persist.
My fiftieth birthday and flowers keep coming, cards, celebration, and love. One of us is still here.
You were supposed to be a hundred together, my mother says.
Eighteen