The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read Free Page A

to ourselves, in the middle of the night, and you taught me the breaststroke (so graceful!) and the sidestroke; and sometimes after swimming we’d go out in your car.

    Langston left the gathering, of which he was star, and came down with us, and saw us head toward the bug. What he didn’t know was that the backseat was filled with a large wicker basket we’d bought, our first piece of furniture, and a painting of turtles that proclaimed “We are more alike than different.” Perhaps we should have thrown them out on the street, to make room for him. He was that precious, though we did not fully appreciate that then. He said, Are you going uptown? Hopefully. We said, with a regretful shrug, No, we are going downtown. We did not say there was no space for him. We watched, grimacing—for he had made us laugh, and more than that, feel comfortable—in the high-rise apartment filled with all white people, looking out over Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. He began walking toward the subway. And I shivered, for it suddenly seemed very cold. And he seemed the father I sort of knew. He’d given everything, been history, entertainment and example throughout the evening, telling wonderful stories of his adventures, as his eyes twinkled and the ashes from his cigarette—which rarely left his mouth—drifted down to dust his tie. Now he was tired and needing a ride, as my father might have, and I was going off into a life so different from his, I thought, that he could not even warn me about it, except cynically. As he, Langston, did later, after we were married, when he wrote to me and said: You married your subsidy.
    It would be years before I learned of the elderly white woman who’d subsidized his early work, and what a “primitive Negro” she tried to make of him, and of how he became sick from loving and wanting to please her, and needing to grow and be himself. When I read about this, how his health only returned afterthe last of the money she’d given him was gone, I wanted to return to that cold evening we had spent listening to his funny stories and drag him into a corner and force him to really talk to me.
    Too late! Is anything more painful than realizing you did not know the right questions to ask at the only time on earth you would have the opportunity? There were other subsidizers in Langston’s life. Mainly white men who supported and understood him. One of them built him a little cottage near his own house in California. Langston would live there peacefully for months on end. Did you remind Langston of these men? And did our relationship remind him of relationships he had known? And was he saying I did not love you? Or that love was only part of it?
    We were invited to his funeral, and we went. We were husband and wife. It was a party. Like him, it turned us back on ourselves, while being superbly—with its lively music and energetic poetry reading—entertaining. At this “celebration” and for years afterward I thought of his words, especially as you, unfailingly generous, supported me, supported my work. Read it, critiqued it, praised it, ran off multiple copies of it on the big Xerox machine in your law office. Sat in the audience wherever I read it with the biggest glow of all on your face. I had never experienced such faith before.
    And now, thinking of the two of us sitting evening after evening reading Langston’s stories and his autobiography to each other, as we mourned his passing and as Mississippi howled all around us, I hope this was the faith, the “subsidy” of spirit and work, that Langston had also, in his own handsome youth.
BURNED BRIDGES
    Last night a friend and I were on our way to see a movie, in her small, far from new car. A helmeted policeman on a motorcycle pulled her over. “What did I do?” she asked. He did not respond to her question: “Is this your car?” he gruffly questioned her. She is a middle-aged black woman, portly, bespeckled and in dreadlocks.