2 stories
I Am Not Clarence Thomas
“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in anyway deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
— Clarence Thomas, Senate Confirmation Hearing, October 12, 1991
Dear Kossola:
We have known each other for many years now. I do remember the moment we met, but I want to recall a time a bit later when you stood before an auditorium of students and chose to recount a story rather than to read from one of your many novels. You reminded us of why we write, the deep place of our storytelling past. This evening of your storytelling is significant because it was also an historic evening of an American election. Above and behind you on an enormous projector screen, a student technician had put up the changing electoral results as they were reported across the nation. Just as your story ended, blue splashed across those united states, and a mixed race son of a Kenyan father became our President. I remember your bemused face looking out from the podium at the ecstatic crowd, jumping from their seats, hugging and crying, cheering your story nested within another, well, another of your stories. Now we have together seen these years pass, the politics of the presidency now remade for reality television, dumped from any assumption or model of integrity or statespersonship into the success of a deal made that you cannot refuse.
Today, June 26, ten years later, the Supreme Court repudiated its previous decision on Korematsu versus the United States, that upheld FDR’s Executive Order 9066 incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans, my family included, during World War II, while, in the same opinion, upheld the Muslim travel ban, another executive order instigated by Donald Trump, calling for, in his words, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Justice Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion wrote:
This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu, and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.
So you would say, stories repeat themselves, or we repeat the same stories again and again, and unless we change those stories, we cannot change our very lives. We hold in our minds and heart the assumptions of stories. But you also have a finely tuned ear for narrative’s linguistic challenges and the precarious meaning of meaning, the logistics of reason that can be useful for any endeavor, any story. But how dangerous it is to use these presumptions to judge, to make judgments that have consequences on the lives of others. The lives of others. This is not a small matter.
The basis of the Court’s decision today as concurred by five justices: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, rests on the government’s claim that the executive order does not mention “Muslims;” that countries like North Korea and Venezuela are also implicated; that waivers for undue hardship are in place on an individual basis; that this is about “aliens” who are outside of the United States; that the conditions of the proclamation will be reviewed every one hundred and eighty days; and that the President, for reasons of national security, has a right to protect the borders. On the face of it, it’s a rewriting of a previous version of the same executive order so that the original idea (banning Muslims from entry into the US) might be obfuscated from the text. The conservatives on the Court can now read and interpret the order with impunity because it does not involve the rights of American citizens nor mention the right of religious belief as guaranteed by the Constitution. That is, it’s not about you, but some abstract you, that is, an alien out there, a non-American in an un-GREAT-ful place. Its meaning should then be read for its “rational” words only. But, what story, indeed what executive order, has no underlying meaning, no context, no depth of thought, no history, no unreliable narrator? And what President and his appointed scriveners could be more unreliable?
The curious, though when you look at Thomas’s record for the past twenty-seven years, probably not so curious, addendum to this opinion, is Thomas’s concurring ten-page writ. It seems that Thomas decides to go further in his concurring opinion by questioning the authority of the lower courts to constrain the President’s authority by “universal injunction.” Now I might have this wrong, but I think he means that the District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court did not have the power to submit universal injunctions of the executive order to ban Muslim travel, that is, to stop it everywhere, nationwide. And then he proceeds to give us a history lesson that goes back to the eighteenth century and The Federalist Papers, and for that matter the English court system under a Crown pre-dating the founding of our country, to demonstrate the “judiciary’s limited role.” That is, Thomas would further limit the judiciary’s role to check the powers of the Executive—president or king, because that’s the way they did it back in the eighteenth century. This is, I believe, what they call an “originalist” or fundamentalist reading of the Constitution, as if its words can only be read as stuck in the past. So, the good news is that, just as the word “Muslim” does not exist in Trump’s travel ban, the word “slavery” does not exist anywhere in the Bill of Rights or the original Constitution. Thomas must have his court clerks scuttling around looking for original meanings; the historic details are dense, arguments summoning citations, citations summoning citations, twisting evidenciary linguistic logic. You could and have, as a novelist, made absurd the fictions of this as nonsense, but again, as you’re aware, real people will live the consequences.
But let’s go back to some original past events. We hang on the decisions of the Supreme Court because we believe our ethical understanding as a democratic people will there be adjudicated, that Dred Scott, or Homer Plessy, or Fred Korematsu, will have their day in court, and justice will prevail. I cannot however see how any judge or any judgment is devoid of politics; hanging onto an originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a strange justification, an arrogance of determining the rules, perhaps a way to sleep at night. And then there is the original past event of the Senate confirmation hearings, the cloud of Anita Hill and her young courage to speak. The parallel, not without differences, of Thomas’s and Hill’s lives are noted in their biographies: both raised in the South and influenced by familial examples of hard work and self-sufficiency; both recipients of policies of affirmative action; both educated in law at Yale; both headed to Washington DC, selected to work on issues of civil rights and equal opportunities. Thomas, confronted by Anita Hill’s allegations, never really answered his accuser, but rather lashed out at white senators and accused them of conducting a high-tech lynching. It worked. What remains of this story is the bizarre residue of a techno-lynching, Long Dong Silver, and a kinky coil of hair on a coke can. The speculative remains of this story is that, 27 years later, the person who replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Court has concurred with one politically conservative opinion after another and is poised to reverse opinions on affirmative action, voting rights, a woman’s right to choose, and to sanction the discrimination of another group of racialized people.
The heart of this story is the unrequited heart of hatred. Your narrator calls it pafology. Bigger Thomas kills a rat, then a white woman, then a black woman. He chops up the white woman and throws her into a furnace. Then he makes the black woman his accomplice, rapes and bludgeons her, and throws her down a garbage funnel. Along the way, he could have also killed a shopkeeper, his best friend, his mother, his mother’s pastor, a Jewish communist activist, the blind mother of the dead white woman, and any one of the reporters or police investigators. Defended by a white communist attorney who manages to blame this pathology on liberal white people, Bigger’s epiphany is that he can die knowing that freedom is embracing his violence. However any reader perceives the terrible anxiety of, shall we say, a lot of really bad choices, this is an awful book, but presumably it’s the book that Clarence Thomas said explains his psychological self. Franz Fanon aside, Thomas is, for better or worse, our native son. This is not good news.
Kossolo, how shall we crawl away from this fiction, recuperate our better sense of ourselves and of others? I invoke here, Richard Wright’s counterpart, Zora Neale Hurston, and the fictional figure of Janie Crawford, who sees God’s eyes watching hers. Living through two unhappy marriages to free black men whose property and accomplishments give her stability without love, she finally finds happiness with a gambler and storyteller who, in the end, she must kill to save. Life is not fair. Justice is finally political, and certainly not blind, not colorblind.
Kossolo, I am not writing to you for answers. Though perhaps you can merge these irreconcilable parts into whatever it is that fiction writers do. I only want to say that today I require a story that will release us from hopelessness.
And so,
The Brother’s Parking Lot
Please take your ticket and proceed forward.
The voice is melodious to my ear. I can’t help but respond, Yo brother, don’t mind if I do. I wait for my ticket, but it doesn’t appear.
The machine hesitates, then: That’s some car you have there. Candy-apple red BMW 230i 248 turbo-charged four-cylinder, zero to sixty miles per hour in 5.3 seconds.
I stare at the machine, then look around for the surveillance cameras.
The machine continues impassively: Of course, you could have gone for the M230i turbocharged 3.0 liter inline-six; that babe lightning rockets to sixty mph in a second less, but that would be another ten thou. What’s another second? I’d say, brother, this is a good starter package for the newly tenured.
I could be hallucinating. It’s been a difficult morning. Ah, do you think you could give me my ticket and raise that arm?
Now hold on a minute. You started this conversation. You can’t just drive on by and park.
But this is a parking lot.
So it is. So it is. But didn’t you call me out?
Call you out?
You know, call me “brother.” I certainly appreciate it.
I think, okay, this must be like that Alexa thing. It responds to “brother.” I say with authority, Brother, open the gate now.
Not so fast. Not so fast. Plenty of appropriate parking spaces in here, give you all the room Manitoba needs to keep those pesky nicks and scratches far away. Besides you got the extended body plan.
I sit in silence, fuming. I glance at my Apple watch, search for my phone.
Brother, the machine continues, just settle down. It’s rare to meet another brother in this parking lot. And I got one helluva story to tell you.
I look in my rearview mirror. The cars are backing up behind me. What about them? I ask, pointing behind.
No problem, says the brother in the machine.
I get out of my car and walk over to confer with the silver Volvo. When she sees my face, I can see her fumble with the controls; her window rises to close, but I can hear her screaming inside the glass. What the fuck? Did you break it? A head pops out of the black Honda behind her, and he says, what’s the matter? I got tickets to see the matinee. Hey, he looks at me. Let me tell you how it works. You push the call button and get some help, see? Patronizing son of a bitch. The guy in a beat-up green Subaru behind him yells to the car behind, Move back! I’m backing outta here, can’t you see? The thing’s busted. Him and his overpriced sportscar, he waves at me. He had it coming! The woman behind him honks and yells, Hold your horses. I am backing out. Can’t you see? Now she’s yelling at me. It says it’s full! Full, you fool. I look at the signage: FULL. I point to the sign, shrug at the all the irritated drivers lined up behind me, and walk back to my car.
Micro-aggressions, the brother in the machine sighs. You have no idea. I get them all the time. Think about it. All those folks behind you, they used to be kids, cute babies and innocent children. You and me included. Now we are all in different stages of ugly.
I get back into Manitoba. The rearview mirror frames the cars behind backing out in various attitudes of hostility. Then, it’s quiet, and the brother in the machine begins.
If anyone knows my story, it’s the short version on the headstone with my name misspelled:
Louden Nelson
Native of Tennessee
Born May 5, 1800
Died May 17, 1860
Misspelled?
What would I know? I was illiterate. Signed my last will and testament with an X. What’s in a name given by a master named William Nelson? Except he named my three brothers Canterbury, Cambridge, Marlborough, and so I got to be London. Know what I’m saying?
London Nelson?
The one and only. And I might have come from Tennessee, but I was born in North Carolina. Hey, I can’t complain. At least I got a headstone. Below that is a plaque dedicated in 2006. Says I was born a slave and came to the California Gold Rush in 1849, secured my freedom, came to Santa Cruz in 1856, worked as a cobbler, bought a piece of land near River and Front Streets. Before I died, I willed everything I owned, 716 acres, to the Santa Cruz School District for the purpose of education. I am buried at Evergreen, an honored pioneer. This is mostly true. Local California history for fourth graders, but wouldn’t you like to hear the whole story?
I look purposefully at my watch, but the brother is on a roll.
Like I said, I was born on a midsized rice plantation in North Carolina along Cape Fear River in 1800, twenty-four years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and thirteen years after that of the US Constitution. The master of the plantation, William Nelson, was a Tory loyalist for the British, but after their defeat at Moore’s Creek in 1776, old man Nelson tucked away his loyalty and in the intervening years only named his slaves after places in England. You might say that my becoming London was ironic.
Wait a minute, I interrupt the brother. Just to be clear about this, you’re telling me a tall tale, right?
Brother, what I’m about to tell you is all true as best as I can pull together the facts into true fictionalization.
I shake my head. I think about ripping that box out of the cement, but it stands there solid like London Nelson’s white marble headstone itself, and it keeps on talking.
Don’t you worry, what I’m about to tell you is pure poetry. Now, where was I?
Irony, I prompt.
Oh yeah. Not that there weren’t others in the vicinity who supported Cornwallis, but the Nelsons were set apart, shall we say. Sometime after the last of my brothers, Marlborough, was born, old man Nelson died. The oldest son John had already got his inheritance and started his own plantation some parcels away. Daughter Mary married and moved to Charleston. The next son Luke died in a hunting accident. That left Mark who got the land on Cape Fear and the youngest, Matthew; he got us. Matthew got the slaves. Matthew had enough of being set apart, the Patriot vs Tory thing, so he took himself, his widowed mama Fannie, and us – Canterbury, Cambridge, Marlborough, and me -- far away to Tennessee. Some said that Matthew got the raw end of the deal, no land, just slaves. But old man Nelson had some kind of plan to keep his operation insular. He made Canterbury his blacksmith. Cambridge got trained as a carpenter and bricklayer. Marlborough took care of the horses. I became a cobbler and I knew about planting. We all knew how to plant and raise small livestock. Matthew Nelson got us: the technology to start again. But let me be clear about this. We were still slaves, you know what I’m saying. The young Matthew Nelson put Canterbury’s son and Cambridge’s two daughters on the block as collateral to buy a sweet piece of land just outside of Memphis. Then the rest of us went to work, building and propagating and creating everything that makes what you know to be a plantation: white porch and Roman pillars, old oak spreading shade across deep grassy lawns, slave quarters, horse stalls with waiting carriages, cotton and tobacco as far as the eye can see.
Once Matthew Nelson set up his household with his mama Miss Fannie at the center, he got restless. He was only about twenty-something. Maybe a wife might have fixed that, but he started breeding horses, thoroughbreds to be exact. That’s where my brother Marlborough came in. Turned out Marlborough was part-horse himself, talked, ate, and dreamt horses, raced them to win every time. This went on for a streak, and then President Polk made it official: Gold in California. Master Matthew caught the fever, and by New Year 1849, he had a plan.
Not like we had a choice to go or not, but Marlborough and I got taken with the same fever with the idea that we could get our freedom. Canterbury was getting along in years, but he was still blacksmithing, making everything from hoes to fancy iron gate work. This was steady income for the Nelsons. They were like sub-contractors who kept all the money for themselves. Same with Cambridge who got sent out to build houses in town. And they had wives and other children and even grandkids. Marlborough and I had nothing but ourselves.
Canterbury drove us in the carriage to the port at Memphis, hauled out the luggage, boxes with picks and axes he’d made special. I remember he had a funny look deep in his eyes. He didn’t linger long, didn’t take to the clamor of the crowds, didn’t pause to notice Negroes chained together vacating the boat’s hull, didn’t wait to see how a riverboat could float away on steam. Even as we boarded the plank, he was turning the horses, following a paddy wagon full of caged black bodies. I stared over the deck at his hunched back, older but still powerful. In 1822, when we heard the news that Denmark Vesey had been hung, I saw Canterbury’s eyes grow wide and flood with tears, but when they dried up, I never saw him cry again, not when his wife Alyson died, not when his son Roger was sold. For him, I think life was a mean mistake. As the gigantic paddle began to churn and pull us away down the Mississippi, I thought I knew Canterbury’s premonition, but I heard Marlborough whoop like he did when he raced a horse over the line. So I let the sad resignation in Canterbury’s shoulders slip away from my own.
The machine goes quiet, and I think I can hear water cascading from the riverboat. I look forward and see the gate arm lifted. I say, What about the rest of the story? But the brother says, Please take your ticket and proceed forward.
Days later, I’m driving to Sacramento, and Manitoba decides to start talking to me, too. The voice pops out of the cyber satellite system, and it turns out it, too, is a brother. I think if I’m crazy, I’m crazy. Just pay attention:
You get into UC Santa Cruz on affirmative action. This was the 70s, and they wanted you. Your people came to San Francisco during WWII from Louisiana to get jobs in the war industry. Moved into emptied-out Japantown on Post Street and got to work during the day. During the night, they brought out their instruments and entertained themselves with the blues. That’s where you grew up. Harlem of the West. Fillmore. That’s where you got your musical education. On the streets, hanging out. Through the walls. In church. And there was the band at Galileo. Your instruments were brass with the Ts: trumpet, trombone, tuba.
Wait, I say, you are not talking about “me.”
No, it says, I’m talking about “you.” And he continues: In those days, no one thought about what was practical. Especially affirmative action colored kids. You were the ones with dreams. The revolution was gonna change everything, and you were gonna be there to be the change. You were not a militant Panther sort, mind you. You knew Huey hung out in Hist Con, his aide-de-camps standing around protectively, but you also knew Huey’s dream wasn’t exactly practical. Anyway, you were secretly in love with a white Jewish kid who played the saxophone.
I shake my head, turn off the system and drive to the motherlode in silence. After several miles, I call up my partner who lives on Long Island. I’m going crazy, I tell him. You were always crazy, he responds. But this is serious, I say. I can see him over there rolling his eyes. He asks, Do you know what time it is? I don’t, so I hang up.
Weeks go by. I park in the brother’s parking per as usual, have dinner a Laili’s, late movie at Cinema 9. Then, I proceed to pay for the ticket at the machine, and the thing perks up like yesterday. Brother, he says, accepting my ticket, I’ve been wondering what happened to you. Now let me continue my story:
At the tail of the big Mississippi River appeared the city of New Orleans. My memory is that it was busy and colorful. And in every corner of that pretty city, in high class hotel rotundas and public slave pens, colored people were on the block. I saw folks auctioned next to furniture and tools. I was born a slave, but I had never seen the actual commerce of it. Supposedly, Marlborough and I were going along to serve the master, but he could, in a pinch, sell one or both of us, if he fancied. Those nights in New Orleans, I rolled around on the floor at the foot of my master’s bed, while Marlborough slept curled up like a kitten. In the day, he wasn’t but eighteen. Freedom was a promise dangling from a long pole extended out there on the road before us. If we had known the road beforehand, would we have turned back? Turned out young master Matthew was anxious to leave too, didn’t want to wait two weeks for the next ship to sail around the Cape but booked a steamer for Chagres, convinced that cutting across the isthmus to Panama would give us a head start.
On the steamer, I met two Louisiana slaves who said their master was taking them to California to set them free. Was that the case with Marlborough and me? I kept quiet. It wasn’t wise to tempt fate. Night before we left Tennessee, Cambridge came to see me, gave me a small wood dog he carved himself. He rolled the carving around in his palm, probably remembering his two girls, got sent away with the same carvings. It was his warning; I kept it in my pocket. Then we got waylaid an extra three days in a storm somewhere out in the Caribbean. Folks on the ship were either sick from the rolling sea or sick from cholera, we didn’t know which. I figure the three of us were seasick because we didn’t die. Being seasick meant we lost the stomach to eat, and not eating must have saved us from catching that plague. Every day, one or two passengers or crewmen died and found graves in the sea. I said a silent prayer for the body of one of the Louisiana slaves slipping beneath the waves. I knew it wasn’t because he’d tempted fate; there was no difference between the two of us. Then the sea calmed, and as we approached Chagres, fish flew from the sea, and we managed to catch a few. Chagres turned out to be a bunch of grass huts with half-naked natives selling bananas, pineapples, coconuts, and oranges.
The isthmus from Chagres on the Atlantic to Panama on the Pacific, as the bird flies, is about 45 miles. That’s something like from here to Monterey or from here to San Jose, but with all the twists and turns by canoe, over mud trail by mules, disease and unknown treachery – natural and human, it was maybe tripled. We might have crossed it in a week, but Master Matthew caught the fever. Before he was completely stricken, he managed to hire two dugout canoes, what they called cayucos, and two natives and gave directions to load our provisions and tools onto both, with Matthew laying under some palm leaves in one. On either side of the Chagres River, it was a knitted jungle, with plumed birds in exotic colors, chattering monkeys, slithering lizards and snakes, and alligators dozing on the beaches. We rowed through this strange paradise, but it was made hell by the scalding sun always pointed directly at us. I couldn’t understand a word of Spanish, but the natives hacked open green coconuts and pushed us to keep getting Matthew to drink that water. Two nights, we camped out in the canoes, roped to trees a distance from the shore, to be safe from tigers and alligators. Mosquitoes and a thousand species of bugs swarmed in thick clouds. All night I listened to the creatures, bouncing above in the foliage and flitting beneath the cayuco -- hunting, procreating, eating and playing.
In the morning, Matthew was yellow with his fever. He whispered to me about the pouch secured around his belly, and Marlborough and I secretly divided and hid the cash between us.
By noon that day, the natives docked near a particular hut on the Chagres, and we carried Matthew there. The woman in the hut was a Negro from Cuba who spoke English. She’d been a slave in Mississippi. Looking over Matthew, she shook her head. You got to rest him here. Matthew tried to rise to protest. Fever for gold is one thing, she said. But this fever will kill you. Mama Hagar? he called, his eyes glassy. What’s he saying, she asked. Hagar, I said, name of my mama. Hagar is my name too, she said and whispered into Matthew’s ear, Mama Hagar says you got to rest, understand? And he calmed. So we stayed there for as long as it took for the fever to break.
The machine pauses, and I look around and check the time. It’s almost midnight. What am I doing standing here? Then I hear: Please take your ticket. Do you want a receipt? Please take your receipt.
This time, I wait for my partner’s call. I whimper pathetically, why are these machines talking to me? He asks, Have you tried recording what they say? Could be new material for your next book. He’s right. The next day, I spend the evening at Verve, wait till closing, then drive purposefully into the Brother’s parking lot. I get my iPhone ready to press “record.” The machine responds, You remember that sister Edna Brodber? Like Zora Neal Hurston, she pressed record, and it just didn’t. You have to listen, you hear? I put down my phone, and I listen.
In that interlude on the isthmus, Hagar and I got along. If Lizzie had lived, maybe we might have been an older couple like that. My own Mama Hagar and Lizzie had their babies at the same time. Mama Hagar had Marlborough, and Lizzie had little London. But Lizzie died. Mama Hagar raised Marlborough and little London together, like brothers. You never know what it means to have kids underfoot until they are no longer there. I had to fish my boy out of the river. He was only five. I buried him next to Lizzie. We got that little bit of time together. That was my lesson.
Finally, Matthew came to, but even if he could hardly raise his arms, all he wanted was to get to the gold. Hagar went about her healing and made preparations so we could leave. One day, she stood on that rickety dock, watched us pack into the cayucos, and said good-by. I wondered if she wouldn’t ask me to stay, but all she said was, You got to take that boy, she meant Marlborough, to California, keep him safe. Hagar knew my story. She sent me on my way. I can’t help but think that’s why she cured Matthew.
To reach Gorgona, we had to help push the cayucos with poles up river. I don’t know why the natives didn’t just rob us blind and abandon us on some alligator beach. It must have occurred to them, but maybe they had compassion for Marlborough and me. Hagar told them: we were slaves, and they were free. Put a spell on them. From Gorgona, we had to continue over land. We hired mules, one to carry Matthew, and two to load our provisions. Marlborough and I went along on foot. Mules are sure-footed beasts, but this old trail was narrow, and with the rain on and off, a mud-slick trench. Loaded with their burdens, the mules sank into the muck, and not few were rotting dead along the trail. Marlborough, half-horse as he was, cooed the mules on, adjusted their loads. On the second day, we came up on a native beating a stuck mule with a rod. There was no room to pass, so Marlborough went over to do his magic. The frustrated native moved aside, but some white man rode forward, screaming, and started flogging the native and Marlborough as well. Suddenly, a shot cracked the air, and I saw Matthew with his shotgun raised. Every day since we’d resumed our travels, I’d been cooking up a makeshift meal of bananas, dried meat and gruel, and making Matthew take Hagar’s concocted medicine. I guess it worked.
Predictably, the story stops. Please take your ticket and proceed forward. I swing around and leave the now empty parking lot. The exit arm swings open, sweetly. Thank you.
I call my partner in Long Island. I don’t care what time it is. This time, he’s more reassuring. He says, I googled it. It could all be true. I deep-breathe in and out.
But two days later, Manitoba wakes up and says:
You know who you are. You were that homeless brother wrapped in three down and hooded jackets, tucked deep into a personal sleeping bag like a black Eskimo in bubble wrap, so no matter the weather, it must have been the same weather inside. And you pushed a literal train of connected shopping carts loaded with your belongings up and down the hill from the post office to Evergreen Cemetery, up and down, every day for years. No one knew what was hidden beneath those blankets and black plastic. You could have been the next Miles Davis, the next Louie Armstrong, the next Tommy Dorsey. Then one day, you disappeared.
I think, I’m getting rid of this car. It must be the car. The car is cursed. But my partner says, You love that car, what do you mean? Why is it talking to me? It’s not talking to you. It’s a car. There’s a homeless brother living in my car, I scream. Do you want me to keep this car? Calm down. I take Manitoba in for fine-turning and get myself a Honda rental, but I still got to park it in the brother’s parking lot.
Panama was a dirty cobblestoned ramshackle town, crowded with men keen to get to the gold. Nobody talked about anything else. The town was surrounded by encamped men. Townsfolk exploited any opportunity to make money off these so-called Argonauts while they waited and hustled for an open berth on those ships passing around the Cape. I wonder how many of them finally got to California, didn’t lose their fever to women and gambling. Matthew thought he’d cut off that long leg of travel, but now he had to compete with hundreds of other gold-seekers. Every ship arrived already full to over-crowded, the passengers on board refusing to disembark, fearing the loss of their coveted places.
In town, Matthew met a widowed lady from Louisiana with five children, the youngest a baby girl just beginning to walk. He was incredulous that she had made the same crossing over the isthmus. This was the wild idea of her husband, who dying of cholera mid-way, made her promise to continue to California. Back in Louisiana, the husband had sold the cotton plantation and all the slaves; there wasn’t anything to return to anyway. Before leaving New Orleans, he’d purchased two years’ supply of provisions, clothing, camping and mining outfits, a set of tools with all the locks, hinges, paints, even doors and windows for a house. Along the way, his widow had abandoned most of it, but even so, she arrived in Panama with eight mules’ worth of baggage. The oldest girl was around ten, and every one of the five children were in some degree ill. An epidemic of measles was spreading. The widow was anxious to leave. It was Matthew who negotiated passage for her on an old Peruvian whaler named the Callao. The captain took pity on the woman and her sick children, and because of Matthew’s attentions, she claimed him as a brother and we her slaves. In a few days, we boarded the Callao, housed in the whaler’s roach-infested and windowless mid-section.
As it turned out, the captain had made concessions for other families with children, but he failed to stock the ship with enough food and clean water. Rations ran low, and the children suffered the most. One child after another died, the babies first. The widow sewed her little girl in a small canvas bag, and the brothers and sisters watched their sibling tossed into the sea. When the widow became ill, Marlborough and I gathered her four remaining children and brought them up on deck into the sea air, made up small games, told them stories. Listless from hunger, they had little energy, hugged their dolls and stared into the open sea. Tabetha, the oldest girl, watched the sun sparkle against the waves, and repeated the continuing dream, They say, when we get to California, we’ll pick gold nuggets right off the ground.
At Mazatlan, the ship stopped several days to restock water and provisions. Matthew and Marlborough took a small transport and spent their time on shore. I remained behind, watching the sailors towing barrels of water back and forth. When we got out to sea again, a storm took the Callao off course. It would be another 75 days before we reached land again. We spent days rolling and rocking in the suffocating dark. Then the winds stalled, and once again we were low on water and food. The captain gathered the men and had us draw straws. The short straw, if need be, would sacrifice his body to feed the others. One man protested and pointed at Marlborough and me and two others who were also slaves, saying we were the ones who should be sacrificed. Matthew grabbed the man and drew a knife near his throat. You touch my boys and I will gut and truss you up for dinner now. The argument Matthew made was that, as we were not really men, we could not draw straws, but others retorted that we ate just like any other men. Later, Marlborough and I argued among ourselves over this nonsense; Marlborough defended Matthew, but only later did I understand why. In the end, the short straw got drawn by a man who days later died in his sleep. They saved his body somewhere, but we never got that far.
Three days later, we saw the Farallone islands, and the Callao cast anchor in the San Francisco bay on the last day of July 1849. I watched the widow, her children following single file, youngest to oldest, down the plank to port. Tabetha turned, looking back at the ship for one last time, saw me, and waved.
Manitoba comes out of fine-tuning and keeps quiet for a time. Then weeks later busts out and says, In those days, it was a stretch to transition to female, but you thought it might be possible. You took your chances, but the drugs screwed you over. You couldn’t find your balance, and you wandered away, confused. Packed your instruments, your tuba, your trombone, your trumpet in those shopping carts along with canned goods and assorted provisions, toilet paper, toothpaste, bars of soap, beers, and camping equipment. Like Sisyphus, you pushed your load up to campus everyday where no one recognized you and no one cared, and nightly, you camped out and slept on London Nelson’s grave. Then you rolled the whole train downtown and hung out near the post office. Up hill. Down hill. Every day. Every night. For an eternity. You didn’t know why. You just followed the voices.
I step out and lock Manitoba. I need to walk. I walk up around the post office to the back of its parking lot, then around again, nodding to two black homeless men propped up on the side of the building. I walk up the post office steps, pass a black gentleman walking out on a cane. What are the chances, four black men passing each other on the same day on a street in Santa Cruz? I need to talk to the Brother. I walk to his parking lot and pull the ticket.
As soon as we docked, the commotion of our arrival became intense. Folks charged out of the ship, thinking they were leaving behind death and disease. Except for the captain, not a single crew member remained, everyone rushing off to find gold. I could see there were ghostly boats and ships of every kind abandoned in the bay. On the docks, every sort of huckster and propositioner was selling their wares and expertise. Matthew moved discriminately and chose to speak with a man with a disinterested pose, sitting on a wagon with plain signage. Elihu Anthony, the man introduced himself. A blacksmith by trade and, he added to assert the honesty of his work, a pastor by faith. Matthew bought Anthony’s pans, picks and shovels, buckets, nails. It was good quality; we could compare it with Canterbury’s work. These implements were added to our baggage, and Marlborough and I got loaded up like mules. Anthony adjusted our packs but looked Matthew in the eyes, saying, Young man, you ought to know, California is free territory. Matthew chuckled, Free to get me some gold, but Anthony returned, That’s not the free I mean. Matthew answered, I know the laws, sir. These boys will not be fugitives, mark my word. Anthony had nothing more to say and seemed to toss his last words indirectly but clearly: My shop and church are down the coast on the Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz. You will always be welcome there.
Matthew had a choice of taking a boat up the Sacramento or going overland. He’d had enough of boats and water, so chose land, got Marlborough to rig a horse and some mules and we found our way to the American River, made camp, and tried to figure out how to separate the gold from the land. Eventually, I built us one of those rocker boxes with a grate and cleets to catch the gold. For seven years, we camped up and down the rivers and creeks from the American to the Sacramento, around the San Joaquim to Mokelumne, prospecting, sluicing for those gold bits. For a while, we labored, heat or snow, and we could make about a hundred dollars a day. When we could sit still, I cobbled shoes. On my own, I could make some good money and got paid in gold. When you think about it, the shopkeepers who sold us provisions made off like bandits, got richer than any of the foolish miners. I realized that if I just settled somewhere and made boots, I’d be doing fine. Seven years, they say, is biblical, and at the end of it, I knew we’d more than paid off our debt to Matthew. I could have walked away I suppose, but Marlborough would have stayed on. Matthew made promises to Marlborough, promises about raising and racing horses back in Tennessee. My debt to Marlborough was over too; he was my brother but no longer my son. I’d kept my promise to both Hagars. And true enough, the unspoken secret was that William Nelson had fathered us all.
One day I had a half-dozen boots cobbled to order and Matthew sent me off on mule to finish my sales. I returned two-days later and found Marlborough and Matthew, both mutilated and strung up on a tree just beyond our campsite. Canterbury’s pick was tossed beneath, blood encrusted over the steel. I couldn’t read the note stuck to Matthew’s body, but I could imagine what it said. I cut them down, dressed them up proper, and dug their graves. I tucked Cambridge’s carved dog into Marlborough’s pocket and set Canterbury’s pick to Matthew’s side. Everything of value or use -- gold, tools, and animals were gone.
I dug up our hidden gold, followed the water down river to a Chinese camp and hid there for a time. And then I made my way toward the Pacific, searching for a town called Santa Cruz on the Monterey Bay.
Walking Tour: Begin at the Louden Nelson Community Center on Center and Laurel Streets. Walk down Center Street toward downtown. Make a right at Cedar and walk down Plaza Lane (next to the Locust parking lot), past Hidden Peak Teahouse toward Pacific Avenue. Walk past Lulu’s and around Verve where Pacific and Front form a fork; from there, cross over to the US Post Office. Walk between the Post Office and the Veterans Memorial Center to the parking lot back of the post office (site of London Nelson’s small farm). Come through the lot to Water Street. Walk around toward the clock tower up Mission Street, just past Center to the brick steps below the Santa Cruz City Schools Administration offices. Walk up the brick steps to the plaque dedicated to London Nelson. Walk across Mission Street to the Holy Cross Church and Mission Plaza, down High Street to the highway overpass. Walk over the overpass and make a left, following the bicycle path to the Evergreen Cemetery. Look for the Chinese arch. London Nelson is buried next to the Chinese.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Sansei & Sensibility, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the National Book Foundation 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is currently Dickson Emerita Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.