not being kicked anymore, it has stopped, and you think, oh,
I’m not dead, I can breathe, now let’s see if I can move, and
you try to stand up no matter what it costs because standing is
the best thing, it gives you something back, and it is in the
process of trying to get up that you look around and see your
friends watching, and it is in the process of getting up that you
see you have to do it alone, and it is in the process of getting
up that you realize without even thinking that anyone can see
how much you hurt and your friends are just standing there,
watching, staying away from you. It is the process of getting
up that clarifies for you how afraid they were for themselves,
27
not for you, and how chickenshit they are, and even though
you are tiny and they are tiny you know that even tiny little
girls aren’t really that tiny, in fact no one on earth is that tiny,
and then they say sissy and it makes you understand that you
and your daddy are different from them forever and there is
something puny at the heart of them that smells up the sky.
You can be seven or eight and know all that and remember it
forever.
*
Diane was holding her scarf, real pretty with lots of very pretty
colors: and it was Marcy who said, your daddy is a sissy.
*
I got home down long blocks bent over and not crying and
they walked all around me not touching me, staying far away.
My stomach was kicked in but my face wasn’t hurt too bad. I
was bent and there was no way on earth I could straighten out
my back or straighten out my stomach or take my hands away
from my stomach but see I kept walking and they kept walking:
oh, and after that everything was the same, except I never
really liked Marcy again, as long as I live I never will: and I
still would have done anything for Diane: and we played
outside all our games: and I didn’t care whether they lived or
died.
*
Down the far end of our block, not the end going toward
school but the end going somewhere I never saw, there was a
real funny girl, H. She lived almost at the very end of our
block, it was like almost falling off the edge of the world to go
there and you had to pass by so many people you knew to get
there and they expected you not to go that far away from
where you lived, from the center of the block, and they
wondered where you were going and what you were going to
do, and I didn’t know too many people up that end, just some,
not any of my favorites: and also the principal of the Hebrew
School was up that way, and I didn’t like going by his house at
all because in heavy European tones he chastised me for being
alive and skipping about with no apparent purpose. So I
avoided going there at all, and also I was really scared to be so
close to the end of the block, but this girl was really funny and
so sometimes I went there anyway. She had a real nice mother
28
and a sort of bratty younger brother. It was the same basic
house as ours but with lots more things in it, lots nicer: and
her mother was always cheerful and upright and never up dying
in bed, which was as pleasant as anything could be. We
weren’t real close friends but there was some wild streak that
matched: she had it by being real funny, crazy funny, and I
had it some other way, I don’t know how I had it or how she
knew I had it, but she always liked me so she must have.
One regular Saturday afternoon H ’s mother went away and
her father was working and she and her bratty brother were
being baby-sitted and I went there to visit. The baby-sitter was
some gray gray teenager with pimples and a ponytail, and we
just got wilder and wilder until we ended up on top of her
holding her down and punching her and hitting her and
telling her how ugly she was: and then the bratty brother came
down and we got scared for a minute that he was going to tell
or she was going to get up because we were getting pretty tired
but he came right over and sat right on top of her and we kept
hitting her and laughing like mad and having so much fun
making jokes about hitting her and calling her names and then
making jokes about that. H was at her head holding her down
by pulling her hair and sitting on her hair and slapping her in
the face and hitting her breasts. The bratty brother was sitting
sort of over her stomach and kept hitting her there and tickling
her there and grinding his knees into her sides. I was at her
feet, sitting on top of them and digging my nails into her legs
and punching her legs and hitting her between her legs. We
kept her there for hours, at least two, and we never stopped
laughing at our jokes and at how stupid and pathetic she was:
and when we let her up she ran out and left us: and when H’s
mother came home we said the baby-sitter had just left us
there to go see her boyfriend: and H’s mother was furious with
the baby-sitter for leaving us alone because we were just
children and she called to complain and call her down and got
some hysterical story of how we had tortured her: and we
said, what does that mean? what is that? what is torture? she
left to see her boyfriend, that’s what she said to us: and the
baby-sitter said we beat her up and tortured her and we said
no no we don’t know what she means: and no one ever believed
29
her. She wasn’t Jewish was the thing. It was incredible fun was
the thing. She was dumber and weaker than we were was the
thing. Especially: it was incredible fun was the thing. I never
laughed so much in my life. She wept but I’m sure she didn’t
understand. You can’t feel remorse later when you laughed so
hard then. I have never— to this day and including right now—
given a damn. Why is it that when you laugh so hard you can’t
weep or understand? Oh, little girls, weep forever or understand too much but be a little scared to laugh too hard.
30
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
There was a stone fence, only about two feet high, uneven,
rough, broken, and behind it the mountains: a hill declining,
rolling down, and beyond the valley where it met the road the
mountains rose up, not hills but high mountain peaks, in winter
covered in snow from top to bottom, in fall and spring the
peaks white and blindingly bright and the rest underneath the
pearly caps browns and greens and sometimes dark, fervent
purples where the soil mixed with varying shades of light
coming down from the sky. The building near the stone wall,
facing out in back over the descending hill to the road and
then the grandeur of the mountains, was white and wood, old,
fragile against this bold scenery, slight against it. When it
snowed the frail building could have been part of a drawing, a
mediocre
, sentimental New England house in a New England
snow, a white on white cliche, except exquisite: delicate, exquisite, so finely drawn under its appearance of being a cheap scene of the already observed, the cliched, the worn-down-into-the-ground snow scene. In the fall, the trees were lush with
yellow and crimson and purple saturated the distant soil. Green
got duller, then turned a burnt brown. The sky was huge, not
sheltering, but right down on the ground with you so that you
walked in it: your feet had to reach down to touch earth. Wind
married the sky and tormented it: but the earth stayed below
solid and never swirled around in the fight. There was no dust.
The earth was solid down in the ground, always. There was
no hint of impermanence, sand. This was New England, where
the ground did not bend or break or compromise: it rested
there, solid and placid and insensitive to the forms its own
magnificence took as it rose up in mountains of ominous
heights. These were not mountains that crumbled or fell down
in manic disorder. These were not mountains that slid or split
apart or foamed over. These were mountains where the sky
reached down to touch them in their solid splendor with their
great trees and broken branches and dwarfed stones, and they
31
stayed put because the earth was solid, just purely itself, not
mixed with sky or air or water, not harboring fire or ash: no
ice sliding down to kill anything in its path: no snow tumbling
to destroy: just dirt, solid ground, made so that humans could
comprehend it, not die in awe of it, while snow packed itself
down on top or rain pelted or punched or sun burnt itself out
or wind flashed through the sky, torturing it. These were
mountains meant to last forever in a community of human
sight and sound: not mountains meant to swallow cities and
towns forever: and so one was surrounded by a beauty not
suffused with fear, splendid but not inducing awe of the divine
or terror of the wild, intemperate menace of weather and wind
gone amuck. These were mountains that made humans part of
their beauty: solid, like earth, like soil. One felt immeasurably
human, solid, safe: part of the ground, not some shade on it
through which the wind passes. The mountains could be one’s
personal legacy, what the earth itself gave one to be part of:
one simply had to love them: nothing had to be done to deserve
them or survive them: one could be innocent of nature and not
offend them.
The wooden house, so white and old, underlined the
tameness of these mountains, the incongruity fitting right in, a
harmony, a simple delight. The mountains and the house went
hand in hand: what would the mountain be without the simple
old house? The cold came from the sky and rested on the
ground: touched the edges of the mountains high up and
reached down into the valley and edged along the road and
paced restlessly on the earnest ground. The cold could
overwhelm a human with its intensity, its bitterness, like some
awful taste rubbing on the skin. But in the fragile wooden
house it was warm: so the cold was not the terrifying cold that
could penetrate even stone or brick: this must be a gentle cold,
killed by small fires in charming fireplaces and rattling
radiators in tiny rooms.
Emmy and I never touched, outsiders at this rich girls’
school, on this campus nestled in these welcoming mountains:
she from Kenya, me from Camden; her an orphan separated
from her family to be sent to a girls’ school in New England as
a little girl; me with the woman upstairs dying and the father
gone to work and the brother farmed out and me farmed out,
32
poor little poor girl; her angry and wild, dark black, separated
from everyone she loved and everyone she knew and arriving
here at this college after three or four finishing schools, unfinished, to be educated; me having gotten here so I could read and write; her wanting to go home; me never having a home
anymore again; her not a rich white girl here at this right
school; me poor; her upper-class where she comes from; me
low down; both smart, too smart, for our own good. Also: in
the world of the rich the poor are outcasts. Being black made
her poor, money aside. The others were like some distant
figures who spoke with cotton stuffed in their mouths: nothing
ever came out clean and clear; they had anguish but it was
fogged, having nothing to do with what she or I understood as
real: not that any of the premises were discussed, because the
rich make their own rules, democracy being one of them, the
democracy being in the pretense that no rules have been made:
they suspend them at will: they don’t know: it’s not their fault.
She had a country to think about and plan for: the freedom of
its people and her place there, now that she had been
“ educated, ” westernized, Europeanized: she knew it but not
what to do about it, and however happy we were, in her head
she was always on her way home, to a place where she would
still be an outsider, in exile from a youth that had been stolen
from her. I loved her. I never touched her.
*
The color that comes to New England in the fall does not
leave it when the trees die. Winter is not barren or monotone.
The great evergreens go on in muted light. The bare branches
themselves are tinted with purples and yellows and tawny
shades like deer flashing by at incredible speeds. The ground is
every color of brown and blue and black with yellow and red
running through it like great streaks, and the purple lies in the
ground like some spectral presence waiting to rise up. The air
is silver and blue as it edges toward black. It has the purest
white and the grim gray of a sober storm and in the center of
it will hang the most orange sun, flaming like dreaded fire. In
the fall there are only dizzying spreads of scarlet and yellow or
crimson and ochre: but in the winter, the colors are endlessly
subtle and complex: so many shades of brown that they cannot
be counted or named, so much purple in the air between the
33
trees and under the earth shining through and sliding down
the mountainsides that when the yellow seeps in or crowds in
next to the purple the mind renounces what it sees, saying:
impossible, winter is something brown and dead. The branches
of the trees are elegant, so strong and graceful, even under the
weight of icy snows: the ice rides them like the best lover, an
unsentimental kindness of enveloping, hugging, holding on, no
matter what the pressure is to shake loose. The white branches
stand in solemn quietude, witnesses without speech to the death
called winter, reproaches to the effrontery of other seasons
with their vulgar displays. The white on the mountains reaches
out to the human eye, persuading it that winter is entirely
sublime and will stay forever, also persuading the human heart
that nothing is beyond it— no cold too cold, no snow too big,
no winter too long, no death entirely bereft of some too simple
beauty, no tree too bare, no color too insignificant or too
subtle, no silence too still, no gesture too eloquent, no human
act merely human. In these winter mountains, the human heart
learns to want peace.
The trees near the fragile white house are endlessly high.
They disappear into some low-hanging cloud, all white and
puffy, wispy, watery, dripping ice that melts and burns in the
bright sun before it gets down to the ground. They are great
carcasses rooted in the solid ground, great thick things all
knotted and gnarled, or smooth and silver-streaked. They never
were just leaves: the bright colors deceived the stupid mind.
They were always their trunks, with great canals going through
them and animals living inside. They have other things growing
on them, even in the dead of winter, even partly buried under
the snow or whiplashed by it as the snow swipes on by carried
by the wind in a storm. The great trunks deceive us into seeing
them all white in a snowstorm: but they always stay themselves, the misery-racked survivors of every assault and intrusion, every wind and falling thing, every particle blown by or falling down, every stone or rock hurled against them or
brushing by: the trunk is immoveable while everything else,
except the ground underneath, moves or dies. This is a permanence beyond our own, redeemed by having no memory and no human speech.
Emmy had come from a place entirely unlike this and so
34
had I. She said almost nothing about hers, except that there
was a huge city, cosmopolitan, exciting, and a university, big,
important, and all around the lush, infested green of hot jungle
thick with insects and heat. It had many languages, tribal and
colonial. It was troubling somehow: because there might not
be room for her there. Mine was simpler, city, a suburb later
on briefly: telephone poles, asphalt, seasons, the ubiquitous
cement, the endless chatter of automobiles and human talk:
not the grandeur of mountains. She hadn’t seen snow, except
maybe once before she came here. For me snow had been:
trying to get back and forth from school with the boys surrounding the girls, chasing us, heading us off, pelting us with snowballs, and the snow melting under the dirty car smoke