Now he stands beneath the apple blossoms
Every year where they used to go walking.
And he tells her about the summer and the autumn,
The winter in his heart,
And their apple blossoms.
We used to walk together in Grove Street Cemetery, where he is now buried, where I will one day join him, and sometimes sit beneath trees and speak quietly and carefully about important things just between us. “Winter in his heart” seems the truest and most literal description of how my chest feels from weeping for him.
After the studio, I clean deeper in the never-ending house, facing it bit by bit. I clean my pantry cabinets and find expired baking supplies: Ficre was excited about the bread-maker that Amy and Joanne gave us, so in his fashion became a bread-making amateur expert. He bought two brands of yeast and powdered milk solids. He read how to make sourdough starter. He bought wheat and white and rye and spelt bread flours, rice flour to experiment with gluten-free bread for Amy and Joanne’s daughter, Marina. I throw all the expired flours away. They smell ever so slightly rancid, but not unpleasantly so. They smell biological. I am reminded that grain is alive, a host for bacteria. Things grow and live in it.
And then, more things go, the makings of confections he will never prepare.
Away, almond paste, for the marzipan-apricot tarts he promised.
Away, date and beet sugars.
Away, unsweetened coconut, which seems to have turned to grit, with which he made his ethereal shrimp barka, the stuff of legend.
As I purge, upstairs my student Kathryn downloads literally thousands of CDs from his studio and loads them onto something in outer space called a cloud. All the music he listened to, his sonic DNA. Kathryn was in the lecture class “African American Art Today,” to which I returned a week after Ficre died to deliver a final lecture. Somehow I wrote it; I needed to write it, and go to them, my beloved community of students for thirteen intense weeks, and deliver their last class of the semester. After the lecture, each one of them lined up and solemnly shook my hand, or hugged me. Not one broke down and neither did I; they conferred their strength to me; they held me aloft.
Here is how I ended that lecture:
“Don’t forget to feed the loas” serves as an entreaty or opening salvo and refrain in Ishmael Reed’s great novel Mumbo Jumbo. The phrase articulates the imperative to remember to honor the deity-like ancestral forces that guide us through our contemporary lives. The offerings on their altars may be fruit or flowers, chicken or wine; when taken metaphorically, offerings may also be found in the form of art and the calling of names that honors our dead and keeps them near.
This is Jason Moran’s “Cradle Song.” Listen carefully: (I played it). “Cradle Song” appears on the album “Artist in Residence,” which was recorded shortly after the pianist’s dear and influential mother died of cancer, a relatively young woman. “Cradle Song” is an elemental solo that sounds something like a mature student’s variation on a simple piano exercise, perhaps a variation on a Chopin etude before the student has learned it well enough to play it fully fluently. It includes the recorded sound of intense pencil writing. According to Moran, this is meant to represent his mother’s writing and note-taking during his music lessons when he was a child. This very very small quotidian sound—the presence of his mother’s hand—is called back into the music, called across the line between life and death and in that sound, she is present. The sound of the writing is the second instrument on the recording; the piano solo is, then a duet, with the mother who was by her son’s side as he learned to become a piano player. If the presence of the mother taking notes by her young son’s side is what moved him forward and accompanied him as an apprentice, its sound on the recording is what enables him to make music after she has died.
Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.