Temple of My Familiar Read Free Page A

his adolescent years, while his mother stared vacantly out the window. Simon Isaac. Or Uncle Isaac. Not that he would ever dare call Mr. Isaac “uncle” to his face, only in his heart; he understood he must never call anyone “uncle” except another black person.
    Mr. Isaac was a greengrocer in the neighborhood where Arveyda and his mother lived. Tall and big-boned, with brooding brown eyes and a mane of wiry red hair, he sat in the doorway of his shop playing the violin.
    All the children of the neighborhood crowded around, the nickels and dimes clutched in their palms for sweets temporarily forgotten. He mesmerized them with his perfectly lovely, improbable music—none of the children had seen a violin before. No one was more enchanted than Arveyda, whose fingers crept, all on their own, to rest on the box of the fiddle. “Fiddle” was the word for violin Arveyda had once heard at home. He inched ever closer, so that he could feel the sweetness of the vibrations down in the center of himself; the near orgasmic opening out in the base of his groin. It seemed natural, when he at last owned both a cheap guitar and a flute, that he would sit on a Coca-Cola crate near Mr. Isaac’s straight chair and play. Natural, also, that Mr. Isaac would encourage his efforts with quick flashes of delight from his suddenly friendly eyes; and that, frequently, as they played together more and more easily, he would seem to forget Arveyda’s presence and only at the end of a tune look across at him—brown, skinny, perched on the Coca-Cola crate—and, with a lopsided smile, ruffle his rough curls.
    “And what happened?” asked Carlotta, imagining Isaac the Greengrocer playing his violin and never working.
    “He had come from Palestine,” said Arveyda. “Everyone in his village not dead or too sick to move came here, to America. He used to tell me about what it was like on the boat coming over. How packed it was. How afraid everyone was of getting sick. There had been an epidemic, some kind of plague. And the people were all herded together and actually stank, he said, from fear. And when they got to Ellis Island, on the very day they arrived, he discovered a boil in his left ear—a big fat juicy boil, like a baseball sticking out of his ear, was how he described it. Or like a spider’s egg sack, when he was feeling more modest. He was sure he had ‘it.’ And right away the doctors ‘in their white coats’—he always said that—came aboard, and they lanced the boil while looking very nervous about possible contagion. He was not permitted off the ship for two weeks, while ‘those in authority’ discussed whether he should be sent right back to Palestine. After that, they took him to a quarantine barrack, and there, from day to day, he ‘politely rotted,’ as he liked to put it. His ear began to heal but the rest of him began to feel ‘not so terrific.’’
    “Ellis Island?” Carlotta queried.
    Arveyda explained how it was the same as Angel Island, only on the East Coast.
    Angel Island, where mostly Asian immigrants were detained, sometimes for years, before being permitted into the country, was a place that, thanks to the aid of rich American friends, as Zedé once mysteriously mentioned, Carlotta and her mother had avoided.
    “It was there, on Ellis Island,” Arveyda continued, “that Uncle Isaac saw his first native-grown colored man. He was pushing a broom. It wasn’t, he said to me once, that he’d never seen brown people; the Arabs in Palestine were brown, but their brownness seemed only skin-deep, whereas this man that he watched pushing the broom, with a little skiphop in his walk as he mumbled lyrics to songs and hummed under his breath, seemed to be colored all the way to, and past, his own bones. It was the first thing he understood about colored people—that it was probably the hopskip way the man pushed the broom, and seemed to be singing in his head, that annoyed white people, not just the color of