Callaloo

I

Don’t expect a straight line. My canvas is time, and I can’t—don’t want to—approach the thing using its own logic, through the pretense of a single discrete, authoritative position. I need to come at it from different angles—a kind of gestalt approach—which means I’ll be flinging ideas at it from around the room.

See, I’ve come to realize my preoccupation with time has a social political component. The notion that time should be measured from a single location seems to me patriarchal and oppressive. Actually, the word I’m trying to avoid (because it sounds even fancier than “patriarchal,” and because it reveals how I am merely squatting in the house of ideas built by Antonio Gramsci) is “hegemonic.” I feel fettered by Western time, and want some payback for its having underwritten a culture that has saddled me with so much shame. I want to make a case for following my own circadian rhythms, to be a free spirit, but in a way that does not expose me to charges of irresponsibility and poor self-government. I mean to free myself from the fear of those charges.

If, in general, I take pains to be punctual and to situate myself within grand narratives, this is born from a fear of being associated with the stereotypes of laziness and bad credit that continue to dog black folks at all levels of personal achievement. Bad credit results from moral failings, I used to think, and would, if I let myself be so stigmatized, prove my inability to master “primitive” impulses I might not be able to identify but certainly knew to fear. I used to want to belong—to America—in a way that would sacrifice every today for an eagerly anticipated tomorrow. Now I’d just like to imagine an America that will allow me to enjoy life in the moment.

During my adolescence, my parents, my brother and I suddenly found ourselves financially insecure. We lived in what was, at the time, a predominantly white middle class community where each of our neighbors’ homes seemed a yodel away from Swiss predictability. It’s no secret I wanted to emulate my friends’ and neighbors’ families. And during those formative, pubertal years I despised my parents for dragging me down with their misfortunes, their low birth. I wish I could say I’m over it. Most Saturday mornings now [End Page 361] I sweep the sidewalk in front of my Brooklyn brownstone, remembering the phalanxes of lawnmowers that would resound in unison those venerable Saturdays as I was growing up as surely as the Wagnerian choruses of cicadas ratcheting up their songs of call and response, come evenings, all across the neighborhood thick with shrubs and darting rabbits.

My wife Ginger and I bought our brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2005. The day we closed, our real estate agent took us to dinner at a Korean restaurant in Queens. She said she’d neglected to get us the traditional Korean housewarming gifts of toilet paper and laundry soap, but urged us to ask the spirits of the house for their blessing before we settled in. It’s more than a century old, the house, and our new neighbors were not shy about lading us with the lore of its past owners like gift baskets of fruit and wine: People have died in our house.

Many remember Miss Bailey, for example, whose parents bought the house, according to popular guesses, sometime in the 1930s, though voting records show a Bailey at our address as early as 1919. She was felled by a heart attack while tending the little front garden. Our current neighbor’s late father kept the house as an income property before the crack-addled 1980s. There are no records for however many walking dead in those years claimed space beneath the roof that is now ours. Kim, the medical doctor who rescued the house, developed complications from a bug bite and succumbed after returning home from one of...