serious face and long braids, now teenage like me, and black,
and with a gang of girls, and she told them to leave me alone
and so they did and she walked away with them looking away
from me, looking grave and sad and even a little confused:
walking away from me, but I was the deserter. I watched her
walking away, and I still see the look on her face even with my
eyes open, a remorseless understanding of something I didn’t
know but she did and whatever it was I had found her but it
didn’t matter because of whatever it was. It was the saddest
moment of my life. Later, mother died. I didn’t laugh or weep
or understand. Why are they gone?
22
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
Mother would be sick and dad worked two jobs, teaching and
in the post office unloading packages. Mother would be upstairs in her bedroom in bed, near death, or in the hospital, near death. My brother would be sent somewhere and I would
be sent somewhere: to separate relatives, suddenly, in the
middle of the night. But sometimes we were allowed to stay
home. A black girl would put us in the bath together and wash
us and put us to bed. My brother and I would play and splash
water and the black girl would wash us and smile, but she was
always tentative, never belonging there. She was always young,
there were so many, even I knew she was young, not as old as
any other big people I had ever seen, and for days on end she
would be the only one to talk to us or touch us or do anything
with us. They were nice to us but never said much and none
stayed too long because we were too poor to pay for help and
eventually we always had to be farmed out separately to one
relative or another. The house of our parents would be dank
with disease and despair, my father’s frenetic dinner served so
fast because he had to get to his second job, the only minutes
we could even see him or hear his voice, and the only one who
talked to us or was nice to us was the black girl who put us in
the bath together where we played and played, after we had
our argument about who had to sit on the end with the faucet,
and she put us to bed: and I always wanted her to stay and be
my friend or at least talk and say things I could understand
like other people did. No one stayed long enough so that I
remember her name because we were funny kinds of orphans:
mother wasn’t dead but dying; father loved us but couldn’t be
there; the relatives split us up so we were always alone in
strange houses surrounded by strange ways of doing things
and adults who weren’t as nice to us as our father was and
they thought that if they were your grandmother or aunt it
made being there less lonely: which it did not. They must have
been teenagers, so much bigger than we were that they seemed
