It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
And so the black artist in some way, spoken or not, contends with death, races against it, writes amongst its ghosts who we call ancestors. We listen for the silences and make that art. “Don’t forget to feed the loas,” Ishmael Reed wrote, and so by making art we feed the ancestors, leave water and a little food at the altars we have made for them, and let them guide the work. We listen; we hasten to create.
Survivors stand startled in the glaring light of loss, but bear witness.
The black folk poets who are our ancestors spoke true when they said every shut eye ain’t asleep, every goodbye ain’t gone.
That is the context in which I met Kathryn. For these last months she has dozens of times asked, how can I be helpful, at home, in the studio, in my office at school.
So now, day after day she comes here with two huge iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts, one for her and one for me, and goes up to her station, puts in her earbuds, and cheerfully downloads the music for hours in a row, working her way through each box, learning this man she never met but who she now knows through his paintings, his space, his music, and his family: everything he left on earth.
V
THE PLUM BLOSSOM
One
Our house is unusual amongst its neighbors: people don’t reside here long, in a community where professors buy these lovely homes and tend to stay forever. When Ficre and I chose the house at 150 Edgehill Road we felt we could see our entire lives in front of us, our grandchildren coming there, sleeping in their father’s childhood rooms left intact. We searched for a table big enough to accommodate feasts of friends and extended family in the dining room I had painted a color I called “Venetian pink,” for Ficre. We relished our role as Command Central.
We would live here but two years as a family of four, and then a year and four months and fifteen days as a family of three.
When a previous family lived here, Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent a night as a guest. With other occupants, we’re told, Thornton Wilder conducted playwriting workshops in the great room that faced the backyard. Our family celebrated two New Year’s Days with black-eyed peas and song. Ours was a house where the piano was played, a house where we sometimes read poetry at the dinner table and once served a coconut cake so delicious it made our guest weep at his grandmother’s memory. A house where the traditional Eritrean guayla was danced in a circle, and where friends danced to funk ’til the windows steamed up.
It was a house where Ficre made red lentils, and spicy beef stew, and Bolognese, and the curried vegetable stew alitcha, and I made eggplant parmigiana and chicken cotoletta Milanese in the manner he taught me, and pesto from basil in the garden, and blueberry kuchen and chocolate Pavlova and chocolate chip cookies with sea salt sprinkled on top. Casa dolce casa, the boys and I now say when we walk through the door, like he did each time we returned from our travels.
Ficre was expressive and eloquent in Italian, his third language, and New Haven had a ready supply of Italian interlocutors. Connecticut has the second highest Italian population of any state in the U.S., after Rhode Island. In New Haven, Ficre spoke some Italian most days. Carlo the carpenter would come and visit when we had just moved into our apartment on Livingston Street. I loved being a pretty, pregnant housewife, making him perfect espresso and serving it in the red enameled cups with tiny almond cookies. Carlo was an elder, full of aches and pains and complaints and off-color stories he’d tell Ficre when I left the room. He made Ficre laugh hard. We’d asked him to make a dining room table for us, of Ficre’s design. For months he’d come and talk over cups of espresso with Ficre about the table, which was always going to be ready, presto, presto. We continued to eat cross-legged on the floor, serving our guests on an elegant Scandinavian mid-century modern coffee table that Ficre had found at Goodwill for ten dollars and proudly refurbished until the clean lines were revealed and the inlaid wood gleamed. One day just before Solomon was born, Carlo called Ficre with great excitement: I have it for you! E pronto! And he came over not with the dining room table but with a handmade rocking cradle for the baby, with his signature carved into the wood on the underside.
I have a dream where time is all a jumble. First, I am in Ficre’s studio, and he has already died. I discover three paintings he has made of an Italian American folk creature, a jumping baby of sorts. In the dream, it is summer early light and the studio is already getting hot.