“Who was Jesus?” I asked.
“A man. A very good man,” my mother responded.
“Oh little town of Bethlehem,” I sang after learning the carol in school.
“A beautiful song,” said my mother. “But maybe don’t sing it for Zadie.”
A story my father didn’t tell us until we were older was the one in which he was chased up a tree by Santa Ana school kids yelling “Jew Boy” and “kike.” Grandpa Henry came out of the house for the sake of his son, but the man was no match for the taunting children. My Lazaroff uncles walked the streets of Detroit ready to use their fists if need be, but my father’s solution to ugly hurled words was to become the smartest, the best, the top of his class. In a letter he wasn’t meant to see, a junior college professor wrote a glowing recommendation to the admissions department at the University of Chicago: Robert isn’t like the rest of his tribe.
“Well, I’ll be an African Gazoop,” my father said when surprised by some news. Imagined animals with strange made-up names, puns, and jokes: my father liked being funny. He chomped down on a pretend cigar and wiggled his eyebrows, playing Groucho Marx at my seventh birthday party. “Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars,” Daddy Bob imitated Groucho’s Brooklyn accent.
Many bedtimes, my mother sang Ai loo loo loo or lullaby and goodnight, with roses bedight. The song I loved most, though, was neither Yiddish scat nor Brahms. I’ve got shoes, you’ve got shoes, all God’s children got shoes. I tried to parse the meaning of Everybody talkin’ ′bout heaven ain’t goin’ there, understanding that not everybody talkin’ was goin’, but not about irony and the frequent disconnect between words and action.
I wanted to trust that people meant what they said. So when, for example, Bubbe and I were at Aunt Annette’s and my cousin Beryl pointed to the clock as we readied to leave and whispered, “Prisoners escape at 5:00 every evening. They gather in the tunnel under Pico. You’d better hurry,” I believed her. I urged Bubbe to walk faster so we could make it through the pedestrian tunnel before the prisoners arrived. I even told her the reason. But Bubbe just smiled and continued her slow pace. I respected Bubbe. But my grandmother wasn’t from this country and I figured Beryl probably knew more about prisoners and tunnels than did Bubbe.
Beryl again. We sat side by side in the breakfast nook at my house, and Beryl—five years my senior—took on the big-sister task of getting me, the pickiest of eaters, to finish my lunch. She used logic, warnings, and threats. And then I heard a rhythmic pounding from under the table. I could see Beryl’s thighs rise and fall. Even so, when she said, “The sheriff is coming, the sheriff is coming. Can’t you hear his horse getting close? Better eat all your food fast or the sheriff will get you,” I believed her.
Why would Beryl lie? Why would anyone lie?
As much as I wanted to trust, I often sensed a chasm between sincere explanation and some truth I couldn’t see but did perceive. My fears lived in this gap. When my father explained about that machine many blocks south whose light swept the sky through my bedroom window, I knew he was telling the truth. But I knew, too, that the searchlight was a path witches traveled to reach me. When my mother told me that the neighborhood boys were teasing about a bomb falling on our house and no other, I understood what she said, but the boys were insistent, and who could be sure a bomb wouldn’t choose the home of the family whose name ended in baum?
I spent a great deal of time scanning the terrain between what appeared on the surface and what lurked underneath. The surface: my family, our clean kitchen, the smell of coffee cake baking, “Your Show of Shows” Saturday nights on TV. Underneath: witches, bombs, the buzzing fear in my skull.
How much of those years was spent inside on couches or chairs! Those inside spaces were actual rooms that I walked through, and they also occupied my imagination. The Aunties’ apartment—with its interior staircase, its covered porch over the street—provided the layout I most often summon when an apartment appears in a novel I’m reading. Fifty-five years later and I still catch the smells of that second-floor flat: apple kuchen, strudel, and old lady musk.
If a novel takes place in a house, I usually imagine our own home on Ridgley Drive. Whether the text describes one or not, I see a big front porch above a wide lawn that is edged by beds of pansies and stock. I see our entry hall with its love seat and the breakfast nook in our east-facing kitchen. My friend Lolly’s apartment gave me the set for any story taking place in a railroad flat. If a dwelling is described as “art deco,” the kitchen in Rosalind’s apartment appears in my mind. A novel placed in the suburbs summons Uncle Aaron’s house in the Valley. Sometimes the fish tank from Uncle Al’s house on Citrus sneaks in, or the maple table in Aunt Nora’s kitchen, or Bubbe’s O’Keefe and Merritt stove, the place mats and tall tumblers at my friend Mary Jo’s, the tiny cubes of ice cream Ahmee served for dessert.
I wasn’t always inside, though. I climbed trees with Cliffy and Stanley, the twins next door, and played statues with Mary Jo on our lawn. I walked to the bus stop on Pico to meet Zadie, shopped for my mother at Joe and Ann’s, and sat under the fig tree in my grandparents’ yard making purses from the thick fallen leaves. I helped Zadie carry the trash to the incinerator out back and watched him fill the stone cave, set the fire, close the latch. Some Sundays, Daddy Bob took me to Beverly Land where I rode the horse named Patches. I loved the two trees that stood at the furthest edge of our back garden. Twinkle Twinkle, I named one; Lullaby and Good Night was the other.
Inside was best, though, sitting on the wooden bench of our breakfast nook dictating stories that my mother transcribed. At school, too, I liked most the big crayons and the large sheets of newsprint. Reading circle didn’t make me nervous, and I didn’t mind being quiet and paying attention when the teacher told us what to do. Outside was where kids taunted Tannenbaum Atom Bomb Cannonbomb and where I stood as far back as I could watching others play jacks and jump rope. Outside was trying to make myself invisible when partners were picked and teams chosen.
Anyway, I liked listening and staying quiet: teachers, parents, uncles, and aunts. I liked watching the adults at home gesture as they talked about Edward R. Murrow, loyalty oaths, McCarthy, and Stevenson. I loved listening to the music made by their voices and watching emotion play on the planes of their faces. Lazaroffs, Tannenbaums, Porgeses: As though I were in a ballroom whose walls were mirrors shining light in all directions. It wasn’t me reflected, exactly, but some bright beauty, a multi-faceted flashing. Years later, when I heard Sweet Honey in the Rock sing Ysaye Barnwell’s “There Were No Mirrors in My Nana’s House” with its repeating line, and the beauty that I saw in everything/was in her eyes, I recalled my own family.
When, as a young mother volunteering in my daughter’s kindergarten class, I began sharing poems in schools, I found that teaching allowed my eyes to mirror love, too. Not only to Sara, my daughter, but to children I didn’t even know. By September 1986, when Spoon and I sat in one of San Quentin’s basement classrooms talking about poems, this being-a-mirror had become a favorite aspect of teaching: reflecting to others their own joy, beauty, curiosity, excitement, and humor.
San Quentin and beauty, prison and joy. I’d only taught the class in which I’d met Spoon for a single year, but that was more than enough time to note the oddity of teaching poetry—with poetry’s inherent invitation to open one’s mind, heart, spirit, and senses—in the closed world of a maximum security prison. Sure, there were some guards who joked in a friendly fashion with the men in blue and a few administrators who spoke about inmates as human beings, but the institution—the five tiers of cells in each cellblock; the locks, keys, and cages; the rules and procedures—seemed designed to reflect one consistent image of people in prison: monsters capable only of evil.
But my students weren’t monsters. Despite the fact that almost all of them had been convicted of murder, they weren’t evil. They weren’t ciphers, either—not generic “convicts” or “inmates.” Angel, Coties, Elmo, Gabriel, Glenn, Richard, Smokey, Spoon—each man had a name, each was a human being with his own nature and experience.