Revision Begun August 30, 2002

1 My Path to Greatness Part One: In the Long Ago Long before I came to any knowledge of Jane Thayer or fully embraced that I wasn’t among the brightest stars in the firmament and before my parents and two of my sisters made themselves invisible on the earth, there is my childhood room overlooking Broadway, along which the cars and trucks and buses of the city are given the right of way to race along, not as they please but within the guidelines of the traffic lights installed to impose a kind of order, a sorrow suffusing me that the trolleys cannot be there too in the time that I have come into but had to be retired in the relentless current of change the world has not found a way to resist. Before the bad people came we lived in a palace bigger than any ocean, with rooms that sparkled. Jewels hung from our necks and gold lace shone in our hair and the radiance of springtime was always in our lives and frankincense and myrrh were at our disposal. In chariots we rode and slept in bowers of bliss and drank the milk and honey of the land. “Don’t exaggerate, my son. But yes, how beautiful it was,” Momma says, while braiding her long brown hair by the full-length mirror in the vestibule. “Why did the bad people come?” I ask. “Because there is iniquity in this world. There always has been and always will be, until Jesus returns, like a thief in the night,” Momma says. 2 “What is iniquity” You can always ask Momma a question, and the answers she gives are all her own. “Iniquity is when the heart lives without Jesus and is filled with dark purpose.” “And why would he come like a thief in the night?” “Because it is for thieves to live for surprise. And Jesus too will be a big surprise. And so you must be ready for him with a soul whiter than snow when the clouds part and Judgment Day arrives.” Momma talks this way. She is on fire for the Lord and says Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. Momma sleeps in a big mahogany bed, in the room next to mine. When I wet my own bed and the warm pee turns cold in the night, I go to her and lie next to her warmth. There is the endless softness of Momma in which to lose myself and the brittle hardness of my father on the other side. In the morning I wake in their bed to find him staring down at me, his arm across my chest like an iron bar. He is smiling, as if I am an insect he had caught and is now closely examining. It is everything for me not to struggle, though I can feel a sense of panic rising. Smiling or not, my father’s face, with that big nose full of hairs, has the dark purpose Momma spoke about. “Are you my good son?” my father asks, as if he has some doubt. “I am,” I say. “You are what, my son?” Though I feel my own smile giving way and a scream coming, I manage to say, “Your good son.” “And does my good son want to get up?” 3 “I am OK,” I say, knowing I must not say yes, yes, please let me run off to the open spaces where you are least and even not at all. Please let me go into the life of freedom I must have before your violence unfolds in a perishing act. Please do not trap me here forever so I can never live. Because if the panic that is beginning to rise is allowed to show, the consequences will have to be severe. The iron bar would press harder against my small chest and the smile would vanish from my father’s ancient face and the extermination process would have to begin. And there it is, his arm lifted like those zebra-striped crossing barriers in front of railroad tracks. My father is saying there is a price for Momma’s bed, and the price could be my life. My father is not my father. I say this one morning to myself. I am Momma’s son, her Svenska pojke, as she calls me. I can wear the blue and yellow and white of Sweden and not be burdened with the blackness of the land of rats from which my father comes. The truth is, if I am to go back to the beginning, at which I can never seem to arrive, I was in Momma’s room before I was in the room next to hers. A cot had been placed behind her bed, where I was to sleep. I know, because I would lay there, my head bursting with sums I could not manage—long division and multiplication and all the rest. A sinking feeling would come over me that would cause me to cry and cry, as if I were falling into a hole from which I could never escape while life moved on, leaving me behind and all alone. “Trust in the Lord Jesus,” Momma said. “He will take care of your every need. The nighttime is Jesus time, my son. All the time is Jesus time, my son.” 4 My older sisters, Rachel and Naomi, were in the room next to Momma’s back then. I would hear Naomi’s voice rising in song to Rachel’s accompaniment on the old upright, sheet music on the stand in front of her. It was the voice of the world with its worldliness sounding, bright and sassy Broadway singing its show tune best in defiance of the flames to come. No mournful “Old Rugged Cross.” No tearful “In the Garden.” It accelerated past “Bringing in the Sheaves” to establish itself on the gayest corner of life, where the world in all its splendor had come to gather. Hard-hearted Hannah? Was Naomi going against my oldest sister with words? Was Rachel collaborating? And what was a vamp, and what should it be doing in Savannah? They frightened and thrilled me with their accessibility to the places I had not gone. To hear them summoned a rush of excitement but one that did not allow me to draw near them. Their smiles were not so much friendly as fierce, signaling they were intent on a victory that belonged only to them. Though Momma said those songs were from the world and had not the sound of God in them, to me they were the light of hope that Rachel and Naomi could be in the world enough to bring them into our home, because even then the world was something I wanted more than the Jesus I knew to fear. Naomi and Rachel did sometimes go against Hannah with words. “Poor Hannah. Can’t leave home…Have you ever seen such big feet? They’re bigger than Daddy’s… Daddy is Hannah’s boyfriend…” And then, because Hannah was riled, they had to go against her with fists and nails, the two of them scratching and punching and pulling out Hannah’s hair and Hannah doing the same to them. 5 Rachel wore her hair in a long braid, the same as Momma made using the full- length mirror by the front door. Momma combed out her long, long hair before braiding and wrapping it around her head. But Rachel allowed the braid to hang down, thick and long, like Rapunzel. She would come home cradling a stack of schoolbooks against her chest, as if they were where her treasure truly was. The room she shared with Naomi was like no other in the world. She slept on a sea of books, four or five deep on the floor, with her eyes open on their pages. To Rachel this was not disorder but a sign of plenty. Momma was proud of Rachel as her shining star and had high hopes that she would take her place as a great nation of the world. Rachel would strike me in my infant years—“That is what you deserve for being such a little Flathead,” she would say, in delivering her blows—and so Momma tried to keep her away. “The light of love is in Rachel, even if she doesn’t show it,” Momma said. She put me in the care of old Bessie Floxley. Bessie lived farther uptown. She let me climb in and out of her ground-level window, and would take me through the swinging doors of the tavern down the block, where everyone knew her name and I could play on the sawdust-strewn floor. Bessie was alone in her apartment and her life. When she became ill, Momma took me and my older brother Luke to visit her on Wards Island, a strip of land in the East River. An overwhelming stench met us as we entered the open ward and stared at the endless rows of beds and the pale, ailing specimens lying on them. The unmistakable smell of sickness and of death remains with me, and the horror that people could be grouped together, with no privacy, in such a way. I couldn’t get away soon enough, and was astonished that Momma had brought me in the first place. 6 Even if Naomi and Rachel did call me “Little Flathead” because the back of my head was amazingly flat and gave me hard slaps across the face for being such a little Flathead, they were my sisters, with the magic powers that older sisters possess.

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