NORTHSTAR PUBLICASTIONS

       Between Shadow and Smoke: A Memoir

     The moribund grave of sin and self-loathing that I have dug for myself is cavernous; it walls scaled high by the layers of foolish pleasure. I’m mid-aged now, and already I feel the end drawing near, dark clouds forming in the valley just beyond my most recent crisis.  Was it my selfishness and my supercilious nature that spelled my undoing? Was it my lack of regard for the needs of others? Can I blame it on a mind beclouded by years of drug abuse? Was it the protracted state of denial, my shameless appetite for sex or my prodigious thrust for approval? 

      Gone is the five-bedroom Victorian two-story in the suburbs and the two cars. Gone too is my sense of self-worth, let alone any respect that I may have garnered from my family and friends. Friends, now that’s a joke. I never had any, really.  Lots of casual acquaintances along my primrose path had passed for friends, but never a friend in the lot.  Maybe that’s because I was never truly befriended a single soul. Not a one.

     To anyone who has befriended me, my name has become synonymous with disappointment. My three children no longer make inquiries, unless of cause Christmas or a birthday is drawing near. But, I guess I had that coming too. My two stepchildren told me in no uncertain terms, “You’re not our father so you can’t tell us what to do, so why don’t you just go.”

      Years ago, I walked out on my three adorable children in search of the effigy of happiness. I had made a solemn vow to each of them, while they slumbered, blissfully, in their cribs that the stars would desert the heavens before I left them to face the cold, unforgiving world alone. So much for vows because that’s precisely what I did.  With all of my years of serious study, efforts to education others, and the pursuit of academician credentials: I’ve never learned the meaning of the word fidelity. Honesty, devotion and sacrifice were tragically missing from of my repertoire as well.  

     How did I get to this wretched place maligned by the shadows of iniquity and clamminess of self-deprecation? A murder of crows has descended down upon my field of dreams. The timorous scarecrow, that is my inner self, stands idly by while my spiritual harvest is ravished by thousands of tiny, ravenous beaks.

     I have used people and they have used me and I have been too blind and too stupid to know it. 

     I am circumscribed by debt and couldn’t obtain credit enough to purchase the hole in a donut? My good health is beginning to suffer from years of “experimenting” with life’s little helpers and then washing them down with ample amounts of inebriation.  Binging on drugs and alcohol had become my perilous aversion from reality.

       Taking the easy way out has cost me my pension after nearly twenty years at a teacher, I have next to nothing to live off of after I’ve cross the finish line.   I have squandered a modest salary with no thought to the golden years.  

     I married badly, no wretchedly which ended the only way that it could have, with pain and suffering all around. The one woman who stuck by me through it all has yet to be makes an honest woman. Like all the others, she has received only the promise of a good life.

      Buried in a deep, dark cave of dreadful despair, where the sympathetic voices of strangers are the only cure for feeling of alienation. I found gratification in lust, not love.  The touch a forbidden thigh or a stolen kiss my only salvation.   

     I offer no apologies and have few regrets concerning the life that I’ve lived because, to some degree, my life chose me. Ok, it was my choice to lie, to steal, and to hurt the very people who loved me the most by betraying their trust, but then there were all the mitigating circumstances.  

     I have unleashed my share of wrongdoing into the world. For that I have paid and continue to pay a karmic retribution. From me, the devil has deducted his pound of flesh.  But I have also contributed a fair amount of joy and laughter into the world, as well. For that, I have been rewarded. The light of my divine soul flickers faintly in the face of a hellish gale. Nevertheless, it still burns, and where there is light, there is life, and where there’s life there’s hope. 

       This book is a testimony to the healing powers of that hope.

       Only the truth matters now, or as much of it that remains unsullied by the gauzy veil of my faulty perception.  Sometime an embellished portrait of truth is all we have to go on.  One’s personal truths told to self and others become the pretentious ground on which our world rest.  Reflections and remembrances twisted into a cadre of fibrous strands bounded into a self-image.  

       This assures that my stories are fact and fiction, real and imagined, lies and gospel.

      Already my literary legs are sagging under the weight of reservations; my mouth is too dry to swallow and stomach flutters with anticipation of a journey to the furthest region of my past.  A past that until now, I’ve only visited by way of nightmares. The thought of holding the actions my loving parents, who are both deceased, up to light of scrutiny terrifies me.

     But, the thought of examining my own deleterious thoughts and misdeeds frightened me even more. So much so, that I thought of scraping the project more than once. However, in the end, I knew that I have no other choice but to plunge head long into the icy, but often healing waters of life. I pray that absolution and spiritual expurgation lies in wait at the other side, waiting to caress me, suckle me and restore me.

     In addiction to the therapeutic reasons, and the compelling urge to tell my story, I revel in the thought of revisiting my childhood and all its tragedian twist. I long to again set eyes on the salubrious faces of my youth, I miss them so. I dearly miss them so.  

Chapter I

       The night was bitter cold and the moon full, and the stars more numerous than the grains of sands on the Sahara.  On such a night, I was brought into the world, January 11, 1956 at 11:05 pm just for the record.

     Harlem hospital was still except for triage unit at the rear of the building. On the maternity ward, nurses, garbs in nightingale white smocks, made theirs first rounds of the night. Their rubber sole shoes acted as tiny suctions threatening to fasten them in to the floor. The smooth, silky nylon rubbing of thighs were the only other sounds in an otherwise silence hall. Mabel Simms, my mother, was resting up from the miracle of childbirth.

      A nurse returns to her station. “Mark it in the book that at 12 midnight the patient in 409 is resting soundly.”

     “Duly noted,” the head nurse comment, with a nod, her pasty complexion illuminated by the light of a single desk lamp.  “You know she’s not taking the baby home.”

     “Another one?  How these people have babies and then cast them aside like old clothing never ceases to amaze me.”

     “The women taking the little tike home just left here. With all the questions she asked, you would think she just had a baby.” 

     The head nurse managed a dry laugh; got up from her seat and reminded her subordinate to keep an ear out for patient in room 420, who had a cesarean section earlier that evening.

     “Looks like it going to be a quiet night. I have some hospital matters to see to. I should be back in about 20

     I am only five days old and already I have two mothers, and I am the subject of hospital gossip.

       “I’ll have to see some Identification, Mrs. Hall,” the hospital administrator asked.

      “Here you are,” said Mrs. Hall. She had had several tragic miscarriages and couldn’t bring forth life from her womb.

      “Mr. and Mrs. Hall, it looks like all your paper work is in order. I have one of the nurses bringing the baby down now. Congratulation and I wish your new family all the best.

     “Thank you, Miss,” Mrs. Hall answered gratefully.

     And, that’s the way it all began. My life’s course immutably altered with the simple signing of a piece of paper in a hospital office three days after I was born. My new mother arrived wanting to make an impression. From her second hand mink stole to her French bonnet, complete with veil, she exuded air of black bourgeois. No one would have guessed that she had been a chambermaid since arriving in New York City from Vicksburg, Mississippi. 

     She did most of the talking, while Mr. Hall stood idle, his listless expression hiding none of his reservation. If it was not for her husband’s plain trouser, slightly worn, and over starched white dress shirt, fraying around the cuffs, she may have been able to pull it of.

     Nonetheless, nothing could have spoiled that moment for her. She had what she so long desired, a baby of her own.

Chapter II

      James Audie Hall Jr. she announced, when asked the baby’s full name. While my new parents hung my first and last name on me, my middle name was not of their choosing.  The mother who bore me spent a good deal of her pregnancy in the old movies palaces on 42nd Street. Audie Murphy was staring in double feature. And as in all his movies, he played a Hollywood version of himself, a bona fide American hero. Perhaps, that’s every mother’s wish for her son. With a name like Audie, how could I miss? I guess she hadn’t fully dismissed the idea of keeping me or perhaps it was a parting gift, something forever special between us. 

                                                       Chapter Two

     “Jenny, get up. You know that I got to go to work in the god damn morning.” His voiced echoed off a nearby wall, as he didn’t bothered to turn around. Before he could get the words out, she was already out of bed and sliding into her tattered slippers and shabby bathrobe, where empty hoops suggested there had once been a belt.  In another minute, she was standing in the kitchen, in the glow of the stove light, rocking and cooing her bundle of joy.

     The whistle from the kettle failed to pierce her cocoon of rapture. Instead, she stood in the cramped kitchen singing softly and grossly off key. 

      “No sir, I don’t mean maybe. Yes sir, you’re my baby now”.

     And, so it went. Mr. Hall’s becoming increasing irritated by his wife’s maternal obsession. With her home all day, money was tight. And, when he got home, the oven was as cold as the winter wind. Not that she cooked all that much to begin with. He didn’t marry her for her cooking. Oh, she could cook all right. Its just, well, Virginia Braxton Hall couldn’t be just a housewife.  She had to be more, much more.

     As a child growing up in Vicksburg, she dreamed of one day becoming a lawyer, but her dreams were quickly dashed by her mother’s tainted perception of the South’s many distinguished attorneys-at-law. “All lawyers are liars”, she recalled her mother saying. It was unfortunate because my mother would have made a helleva attorney.

     “James, are you ready to eat?” “What the hell do you think,” he yelled, with all the anger of a morning factory whistle.  Before she could return with the food, the phone ran. It was her father, Roscoe, known to everyone as Pop. His drinking and gambling was slowly draining the life from his frail body.  James couldn’t touch the food, and was up pacing, and listening in. From what her manage to detect, he knew what was coming next. 

     “James, I sorry, but Pop is sick and I’m going have to take him to the emergency.”

    “ What about your brother or what’s her name... You know, the women who stayed with him last time.”

     “James, he is my father and he needs me. I don’t know how much time he has.” Pop was Roscoe T. Braxton, a gambler, con man, and womanizer and my grand father. 

     “The baby is sleeping, James. But, if he wakes during the night, there’s a bottle on the stove. It will only take a minute to warm it up. Oh, and diapers are in the top drawer in his room.” All he could do was watch as his wife circled the room like a Texas tornado scoop up clothes as she went. In no time she was dressed and heading for the front door.  Setting his plate down, he reached over and twisted the knob on the radio beside the bed. However, not even the melodic sounds of The Platters could sooth his anger.

       Through the velvet crooning, he could hear her uttering some last instruction then the door sounded shut, and she was gone.  By now the neck bones, collared greens and red rice were cold. With plate in hand, he stormed back to the kitchen.  He didn’t know what infuriated him more the fact that he was stuck with the baby, one that wasn’t even his, or the fact that he would have to cancel his little love tryst with one of Harlem’s chocolate brown coquettes. It was probably some of both.

     So, from the beginning, my life was an imposition. An imposition to the father that sired me, an imposition to the mother who wasn’t financially able to take care of a baby and an imposition to my new daddy who was forced to cut back his philandering. Come to think about it: an imposition to a nation that welcomed another black child like it welcomed the first timid drops of rain at a Fourth of July picnic.

     But, Virginia needed me and I needed her. For the first three years of my life, I was the center of her world. I monopolized all of her time.  She loved to dress me up and show me off.  We were inseparable.

      “Jenny, don’t you think he’s going to be hot all buddle up like that?”

     “I’ve been telling her,” my father cut in, testifying to the uselessness of his sister’s council.

      Fashioned in a navy blue jacket, matching knee high trousers, white knee socks, Buster Brown shoes and a bowtie, I was quite the little Lord Funtleroy. We were at Aunt Jay Lou’s house, the older more spiteful of my father’s two bizarre sisters. Her razor-sharp tongue repulsed whoever had the misfortune to cross her mean spirited path. She was a self-absorbed money-hungry woman with bad skin: definitely hard to look at.

      Her wing shaped red glasses, embroidered with tiny seashells, did nothing to help her crank appearance. When she spoke she spit and her lips stayed moist far longer than they should have. She kept her furniture rapped in plastic. Stale cashews, which were for important company, filled the crystal bowl on the coffee table. Evidently, no one of any importance ever came to visit considering the granite-like texture of the nuts. 

        I remember crying whenever I was left in her care for any amount of time.

She was every kid’s nightmare. She treated that dim lit and shabbily furnished two-bedroom flat like it was Westminster, and all who crossed her threshold like her subjects. 

     My aunt’s beady eyes followed my mother until she was out of ear range. “James, I give you a lot of credit for taking on somebody else’s problem.” She looked over at me sliding as I slide down from the couch. “Get back up there, boy. Didn’t you mother tell you to sit down? I don’t know how you put up with it.”  

          “The boy ain’t much bother, Jay,” he answered back, while shooting a wink and a smile in my direction.  That was enough to send me dashing for his lap. Grabbing me up in his massive hands, he tossed me high into the air before bringing me gently to rest on his broad forearm. My aunt turned her gaze elsewhere. My mother returned and surmised that Jay had said or done something. Seeing me nestled in her husband’s arms told her everything she needed to know.

     The days ahead saw my father spending more time with wife and son and less time in the streets. We had become a family. I remember Sunday mornings best.   The scrumptious smell of bacon accented with a delightful blend of cheese eggs, grits, and fresh coffee engulfed the house. My father wore his royal blue suit, perennial white shirt, and black Florsheims. I looked on eagerly as he sat polishing his oxfords until he could see himself in the lustrous shine.

     “Come here, boy.” I rose from my place on the floor and stood looking, my weight resting against the Tony Roma coffee table.

      It was in the way he dabbed a patch of old tee shirt into a waxy muck, rubbing the paste, in circular motion, into the leather with a surgeon-like resolve. Holding the ends of the stretch of clothe tightly, he ran it over the tops of his wing tips with a syncopated cadence, popping and snapping the rag at the end of several passes. Occasionally, he’d apply a spray of spit to the tips rubbing out any stubborn scuffs.

     Virginia was always the last to get dress. She said it was because she had to do everything. This was only partly true. She did do a lot. However, because she did everything at the last minute, we were always late. FOR EVERYTHING!

     “Jenny, You gonna be late for you own funeral.” I remember my father saying. It became something of a family joke. My father, once he saw that she was close to being ready, would go down and start the old 1954 Mercury, a big black monster of a machine complete with outstretched wings, chrome teeth, and a earth shaking roar. Beside it gargantuan size, what I recall most is the hood ornament of the god Mercury. We sat in the car listening sound of the Fats Domino as I reached for the station selection buttons coming up way short.

      There he sat across from me, bigger than life. Even compared with other men, he was impressive. He was black as a crow and his cheeks shined like a dangling a Christmas bobble. The runway of skin down the center of his head glistened with sweat, which seemed to pour forth with his slightest movement. 

     But, the sweat was never allowed to dry naturally. My father carried two hankies. One was for show, which he kept in the breast pocket of his suit. The other he used for soaking up beads of sweat or for performing utility work.

      Finally, she emerged from 41-51 Convent Avenue carrying on a running conversation with the neighborhood.

       “Hey, Mrs. Hall,” came a voice from across the street.

      “Hey, baby,” followed by a generous wave.

      “You stepping out, girl,” commented one of the women entering the building, cart of laundry in tow. 

      “Thanks, child. Ain’t had time to look in the mirror.” 

      In our tiny enclave of the city, my mother was something of an arbiter of fashion. They looked forward to her lavish, if not costume like apparel.  In her blue poker dot cotton dress, oversize pattern leather belt, toeless pumps, fox stole, and matching felt hat cocked to the side, she didn’t let them down. Her stylist hats, and the way she wore them, were her trademark.

      Daddy slid me over closer to him as my mother got in, retrieving her compact and mirror from her bag to add the final touched to her look.  Now we were off to church a mere hour and fifteen late. When it came to my mother getting somewhere on time, even God would have to wait.

     Church, I could take or leave. But, I prayed that we would be on time to catch Rev. Moore’s sermon. From a long line of Southern Baptist ministers, Rev. Moore, short in stature but mighty in conviction, was the pastor of Walker Memorial Baptist Church. In classic Baptist tradition, each Sunday he did battle with forces of evil, evoking of the power of the Holy Ghost. As usual, he began with a single parabolic truth. Speaking in a subdued tone, casually pacing the podium, Bible in one hand and handkerchief in the other, his sermon began to pick up steam; his words more emphatic, his tone dropping several octaves, his face losing it grandfatherly charm. 

         His voice was like a storm gathering momentum, slowly unleashing its full fury, until all that lay before it was swept up. Rev. Moore (which most pronounced Mo’) moved his audience to collapsing on the floor, to babbling in tongues, and romping shamelessly in the exiles until they had to be restrained by the church ushers. He called to his flock to go with him and they followed, answering with shouts of Hahaluyahs, Thank you, Jesus, and Aaaaaaaamen. 

       Armed with his fire-breathing brand of preaching; punctuated with masterful pauses, high-pitched intonations, slow deliberation, timely reiterations, he held the congregations in the palm of his hand. This otherwise unobtrusive runt of man became a slayer of demon. His face drenched in the river of Jordan, his fist pounding the lectern though he were crushing the Army of Philistine in to dust, he awakened something in us that laid dormant the rest of the week.

     Handkerchief in hand, he wiped the sweat from his brow, and began his descent, returning to wince he started, back at that simple transcendental truth. Never needing a cue, the angelic voices of the church choir chimed in with a timely selection as the collection plate made it third pass, a fact that never escaped my father’s attention.

      The congregation was allowed to catch it spiritual breath, as they joined the choir in making a joyful noise unto the Lord. Afterward there were a few announcements, prayers for those confined to their sick bed and church was over until next week. The exit was always the same with the church filling out, to a rendition of “May God be with you until we meet again”.

     After church, we always stopped by Sister Cannon’s. She lived in a cramped walk-up on 126^th Street in Harlem. It was a short four blocks down from our house, but to my young mind it seems miles away.

     Sister Cannon’s house was a pictorial shrine to her deceased son, and lost love ones. The dated furniture smelled of mothballs and liniment. Nonetheless, her coffee table was replete with sugary sweet yummies. I would pass on the peppermints and head straight for the rainbow assortment of wrapped candies, can of rock candy and boxes of peanut bridle.

     However, my true passion was her own unique brand of beverage that she called ‘bug juice’. It was, in reality, nothing more that some water, cool aid, sugar and a sliced lemon. Maybe it was in the name or perhaps in the secrete ingredient, lemons, but it was something I looked forward to each and every Sunday, rain or shine. But it wasn’t just the goodies.

      The sight of sagging sup hose, a slopping posture, and plodding steps were nullified by generous and affectionate ways. She let me get away with things my parent wouldn’t, like putting my feet up on the couch or filling up on candy. “Jenny, let the boy be,” she would say, followed by an amused snicker. It was as though she saw in me the folly in another who had be taken from her. As we prepared to leave, I was saddened at the thought of her being along with just her pictures to keep her company.