Ghost of a Flea

“Happy you’re getting the chance to do this.” The grant came jointly through Tulane’s drama department and a loose association of several local arts foundations. She’d learned of it from one of her regular customers at the flower shop, a cardiologist on the board of a couple of those foundations, and had applied more or less on whim.

“Me too. I thought … well, I guess I thought the theatre thing was all over, that I’d had whatever chance I was likely to get.”

“No second acts in American lives?”

“Something like that.”

I sat down beside her now as I had then.

“Thanks, Lew.” She stared for a moment at the script. Commentary and notes had begun not to change the play in any elemental manner but subtly to reshape it, urging plot, surround, self and minions toward-what? She didn’t know. That’s what she was searching for. “Hellacious amount of work hiding in the woodpile.”

“And one hell of a woodpile. But it just so happens we’re running a special on homilies this week, Ms. O’Neil. Two for one.” Made as though to rummage in a bag, see what we had left. “Got Anything worth doing, If it was easy, Hang tough. Few more in there, looks like.” I leaned close. “Just between the two of us, marking them down’s the only way we’ve found to move this stuff off the shelves.”

“Like what Bierce said about good advice.”

“Right. Only thing you can do with it’s give it to someone else-fast.”

She was, as usual, wearing a long, full skirt, and when she leaned back, drawing legs under, the skirt took away not only her legs but the chair’s as well, along with a good few inches of floor.

A group of young people went by laughing and from the sound of it doing their version of dirty dozens on the street outside.

“That’s something else I never thought I’d have, Lew. Couldn’t imagine ever being close enough to someone long enough to have private jokes, places, thoughts that didn’t need to be completed, stories all our own. I love having that, Lew.”

“I do too.”

We sat there quietly a moment.

“I could fix more coffee,” I said.

“Two pots are enough-even for New Orleanians.”

She leaned forward to turn on the radio, found some small-combo jazz, Dolphyesque baritone sax weaving a floor for guitar and piano to walk on. Then a soprano sax sounding scarily like Sidney Bechet started up. Another New Orleans boy like Louis Armstrong and with him one of the truly great jazz soloists. They’d always said Bechet was so good you could put him in front of an army band and he’d even swing that. Bechet, who’d play great music anytime, anywhere, but would never consent to play nigger, and went off to Paris to live instead.

I turned back from the window to find Deborah’s eyes bright. She’d been watching me.

“You miss it.”

“What?”

“All of it. The books. What you used to do out on the streets, helping people. Teaching. LaVerne and Clare.”

“A curious list.” I smiled. “And a long time ago.”

“No. It wasn’t, Lew. Not long at all. That’s my point.”

“It’s just …”

“Just?”

“I have a family now. You, David, Alouette and her crew. Maybe not exactly the kind of family Republicans are always going on about, but a family nonetheless. Things change.”

“Things do, yes. I’m not sure people do.”

I picked up our cups and took them to the sink. Stood there a moment looking out the window. Bat, Clare’s cat, now mine, jumped onto the windowsill outside and began rubbing shoulder and head against it.

“I don’t think I can explain it, or even that I understand it myself. But it’s a little like when you’re crossing the lake.” The bridge over Lake Ponchartrain was twenty-five miles long. “You get halfway out there and you can’t see either bank. You just keep on going. It doesn’t much matter why you’re on the bridge in the first place.”

I raised the window to let Bat in and fed him, probably for the third or fourth time today, but who was counting. Then I rinsed our cups. Deborah sat watching. Bat lifted his head from the bowl to assure himself that no one was likely to fly in under radar and get his food, then went back to eating. Deborah yawned.

“Where I’m going is to bed. You?”

“Maybe I’ll try getting some work done.”

“Don’t stay up too late, love,” she said, reclaiming her legs and letting them take her upstairs to bed.

When Deborah was gone, I took a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer from the refrigerator and went out to the slave quarters. I wasn’t writing books anymore, not for years, but habits hang around like ghosts or idiot children that won’t be got rid of, and sometimes late at night, still, I’d find myself sitting expectantly before the computer. Instead of writing books, I reviewed them. Every few weeks Daniels (last name only, on the official name tag) rang the bell and pulled from her bag a bulky padded envelope bearing the logo of the Times-Picayune, Washington Post, Boston Review.

This one, a biography of Kenneth Fearing, had arrived a month or so back, so I must be close to deadline on it. Fearing, who had achieved celebrity as a leftist poet and mystery novelist in the Thirties and Forties, was now almost wholly forgotten, yet another victim of what he himself had called the magic eraser of silence. Fiercely antiestablishment, a man to whom literary acclaim could mean only the containment of any truly challenging writing, Fearing would have found publication of Floor of the Blue Night by an academic press (according to his mood of the moment) amusing, ironic or abhorrent. I opened again onto the book’s heavily indented pages, thickets of inset quotations and citations like broad stone stairs, like archways, and pulled out my notes, jotted on a typing sheet folded in half.

Then I put the book down, turned off the light and sat peering out. Bat had joined me, an indistinct, inert lump like a small gray haystack on the desk by the window. A family, I told Deborah, with no idea that, even as I said it, already my family had begun shrinking.

In preparation for writing the review I’d looked up a half-remembered poem assembled by Fearing’s contemporary, Alfred Kreymborg, from headlines of the day.

DOUBLE MURDER IN A HARLEM FLAT.

CREW LOST WHEN LINER SINKS AT SEA.

CHINAMAN BOILS RIVAL IN A VAT.

COOLIDGE SURE OF MORE PROSPERITY.

EARTHQUAKE SHAKES THE WHOLE PACIFIC COAST.

MORE FOLK OWN FORD CARS THAN FOLK WHO CAN’T.

KU KLUX KLAN WATCH ANOTHER NEGRO ROAST….

It was in the Thirties, Fearing’s time, that America turned itself into an urban society. It was also, with the proliferation of mass media, when the great divide began developing between high and low art, and Fearing carried that divide within him, on the one hand consciously adopting a kind of writing that limited him, on the other finding within those limits a release of creative powers that otherwise might never have been available to him. Populists like James Agee, and in his own way Fearing, rejected belief that the old high art held some possibility of salvation. Now art, all art, had been democratized, leveled, marked down for quick sale. Now it could only be packaged and repackaged and packaged again to fill the unending need for consumer goods and the media’s relentless demand for product: distilled into streams of sweet-tasting poison.

Little doubt that Agee, Fearing and the rest overstated the case. But in their mixture of populist pride and sadness at the decline of a higher culture lay something vivid and luminous, the apprehension of one of those rare moments when society visibly, utterly changes, and the sense of loss that sweeps over us then. That stream of poison, too, is a thing we all recognize.

Blacks more than most.

The poison goes down from generation to generation like the dissimulation and mimicry our forebears learned in order to survive, never saying what they really thought, putting their distress signals in code, till now, at this late