A decade after dropping out of high school I’d managed to arrive, like some survivor of a tragedy at sea, on the shores of a community college. My parents were thrilled when I phoned to say I was pursuing my childhood dream of being an architect. They were just as happy when I decided to be a sociologist instead. And after that a political scientist. Finally, a writer. “I’m going to write a novel based on my life,” I said to my father one day. I was in an MFA program by then, starting my second year. I’d recently found some statistics that said there’d been a 60 percent chance I’d end up in jail; I had stories to prove just how close I’d come. But after writing the first draft, my tale of black teenaged delinquency seemed too cliché to me, told too often before. I decided to write about my father instead. He, like my mother, was blind.
My father lost his sight when he was twelve. Climbing the stairs to his Chicago brownstone, he somehow fell backward, hitting his head hard against the pavement and filling his cranium with blood. It would have been better had some of this blood seeped out, alerting him to seek medical attention, but when the area of impact did no more than swell a little and throb, he tended to himself by applying two cubes of ice and eating six peanut-butter cookies. He did not tell anyone about the injury. He also did not mention the two weeks of headaches that followed, the month of dizzy spells, or that the world was growing increasingly, terrifyingly dim.
His mother had died of cancer four years earlier. His alcoholic father was rarely around. So at home my father only had to conceal his condition from his grandmother, Mama Alice, who herself could barely see past her cataracts, and his three older brothers and sister, who had historically paid him little attention. His grades at school suffered, but his teachers believed him when he said his discovery of girls was the cause. He spent less and less time with his friends, gave up baseball altogether, and took to walking with the aid of a tree branch. In this way his weakening vision remained undetected for three months until, one morning at breakfast, things fell apart.
Mama Alice greeted him as he sat at the table. She was by the stove, he knew, from the location of her voice. As he listened to her approach, he averted his face. She put a plate in front of him and another to his right, where she always sat. She pulled a chair beneath her. He reached for his fork, accidentally knocking it off the table. When several seconds had passed and he’d made no move, Mama Alice reminded him that forks couldn’t fly. He took a deep breath and reached down to his left, knowing that to find the utensil would be a stroke of good fortune, since he couldn’t even see the floor. After a few seconds of sweeping his fingers against the cool hardwood, he sat back up. There was fear in Mama Alice’s voice when she asked him what was wrong. There was fear in his when he confessed he couldn’t see.
He confessed everything then, eager, like a serial killer at last confronted with evidence of his crime, to have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn’t said anything sooner, he mentioned his master plan: he would make his sight get better by ignoring, as much as possible, the fact that it was getting worse.
For gutting out his fading vision in silence, Mama Alice called him brave. His father called him a fool. His teachers called him a liar. His astonished friends and siblings called him Merlin. The doctors called him lucky. The damage was reversible, they said, because the clots that had formed on and now pressed against his occipital lobes could be removed. But they were wrong; those calcified pools of blood were in precarious locations and could not be excised without risking immediate paralysis or worse. The surgeons inserted a metal plate (my father never knew why) and later told Mama Alice that the clots would continue to grow, not only destroying the little sight he had left but also killing him. They gave him one more year to live, but they were wrong again.
They were wrong, too, in not predicting the seizures. He’d have them the rest of his life, internal earthquakes that toppled his body and pitched it violently across the floor. I remember these scenes vividly: as a young child, I would cower with my siblings at a safe distance while my mother, her body clamped on top of my father’s, tried to put medicine in his mouth without losing a finger or before he chewed off his tongue. My father was a big man in those days, bloated on fried food and Schlitz—one wrong move of his massive body would have caused my mother great harm—but she rode him expertly, desperately, a crocodile hunter on the back of her prey.
I expected one of those attacks to be fatal. But their damage would be done over five decades rather than all at once, slowly and insidiously eroding his brain, like water over stone. So we knew it wasn’t Alzheimer’s when he began forgetting the people and things that mattered and remembering the trivia of his youth. He knew it, too. That’s why, at the age of fifty-five, he retired from teaching, moved with my mother to an apartment in the suburbs, and waited, like we all waited, for the rest of his mind to wash away. By the time I started teaching, when he was in his mid sixties, he had forgotten us all.
* * *
According to the American Federation for the Blind, every seven minutes someone in this country will become blind or visually impaired. There are 1.3 million blind people in the United States. Less than half of the blind complete high school, and only 30 percent of working-aged blind adults are employed. For African Americans, who make up nearly 20 percent of this population, despite being only 12 percent of the population at large, the statistics are even bleaker.
There are no reliable statistics for the number of unemployed blind prior to the 1960s, but some estimates put it as high as 95 percent. Most parents of blind children then had low expectations, hoping only that they would find some more useful role to play in society than selling pencils on street corners or playing a harmonica in some subway station, accompanied by a bored though faithful basset hound. Usually the blind were simply kept at home.
Mama Alice expected to keep my father at home for just a year, but even that was one year too many. She was elderly, diabetic, arthritic and still mourning for her daughter and other accumulated losses. Now she had to care for a blind boy who spent his days crying or, when his spirits lifted, smashing things in his room. His school had expelled him, his friends had fled and his sister and brothers had not been moved by his handicap to develop an interest in his affairs. And so, on the second anniversary of his predicted death, Mama Alice packed up his things, kissed him good-bye, implored him to summon more bravery and sent him to jail.
My father never told any of his children about this. I read about it in his chart at the Sight Saving School, in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he’d been transferred after fifteen months in juvenile detentio, and where, in 1994, the same year he and my mother moved to the suburbs, I went to visit.
Thirteen years later the trip for me is a blur, punctuated now and then with random vivid images. I cannot see the face of the principal who greeted my wife and me, and I cannot visualize the office we were escorted to, but my father’s chart is seared in my mind, a black three-ring binder with “Thomas Keller Walker” handwritten on the top right corner. Before I read it, the principal gave us a tour of the facilities. It was a twelve-acre complex that included basketball courts, a baseball diamond, a swimming pool . . . and classrooms. We were taken to the library, which was a museum of sorts, where the history of blindness was laid out in pictures and graphs behind glass cases. We ate lunch in the cafeteria where my father had eaten lunch. We went to the dorm room where he’d slept. Outside, we walked on the track where, cane in hand, my father had learned to run again.
After the tour, the principal took us back to her office and left us alone with his chart. It contained his height, weight, vital signs, and a summary of his academic performance before he lost his sight, which I cannot recall, though my guess is that it was exceptional. I also cannot remember the progress reports during his two years there. What I do remember was a description of him as “traumatized.” That seemed about right to me. He’d lost his mother, his sight . . . and his freedom. The only person who’d consistently showed him love had put him in prison. He was sixteen. I thought about my own life at sixteen, my delinquency and lack of purpose, and I suddenly felt as disappointed in myself as I know he must have been.
When we arrived back at our home in Iowa City, I typed up my notes from the trip. I decided not to call my father to ask about being put in juvenile detention; he’d had a reason for keeping it a secret, and I figured I should probably honor it.
* * *
In 1997 my parents moved again. My father was having difficulty with his balance and could not manage the stairs to their second-floor apartment. They bought a house in Dolton, a suburb in south Chicago; its primary appeal, besides being a single-level ranch, was its screened-in porch. For two summers they pretty much lived in there, crowding it with a swing set, a glider, a card table, on which sat an electric water fountain, and four reclining chairs. My father was in one of those chairs enjoying a refreshing breeze and the faint sound of gurgling water when he had a grand mal seizure, the worst in years. For two weeks he was in intensive care on a respirator. When he was finally able to breathe on his own, he was moved to a regular room, and a month later, when he could finally speak, he asked everyone, including my mother, his wife of forty-two years, who they were. While he languished in this state of oblivion, struggling to recall his life, I finished the first draft of my book, having him die peacefully in his sleep. Wishful thinking. Another massive seizure put him back in the ICU.
A month later he was transferred to an assisted living facility. Speech therapists helped him talk again, and occupational therapists showed him how to move with a walker. But no one could fix his brain. His thoughts were in a thousand fragments, floating in his skull, I imagined, like the flakes of a shaken snow globe. His filter gone, my father, this intensely private man, from whom I’d had difficulty extracting just the basic facts of his life, was now a mental flasher. My mother called me on occasion to report what he’d revealed.
“Mama Alice arrested me,” he announced to her one day.
“I drink too much,” he said on another.
“That Lynne can sure fry some chicken,” he mentioned as well. After my mother relayed this last comment, there was a long pause before she asked me, “You do know about Lynne, don’t you?”
Lynne was the woman he’d left her for. That was in 1963, thirteen years after my parents had met at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, an organization that, among other services, provides employment for the visually impaired. My father was there assembling clocks while home on summer break from the Sight Saving School, and my mother, blind from a childhood accident, had been hired to do the same. They were seventeen when they met, eighteen when they married and, at twenty-five, the parents of four children. My mother was pregnant with two more when my father moved out. That was all I knew, told to me one day by an older brother when I was in my mid teens.
My parents had never discussed any of this with my siblings or me. My mother spoke openly about it now, though, and then she segued into talking about the man she’d dated during the two-year separation and about the son they’d had together. Her story I knew more about because when my twin and I were ten or so, her son, our half-brother, would come to our house to play with us. Occasionally he’d be accompanied by his father, a lanky blind man who chain-smoked and had a baritone voice that made me think of God. These attempts at civility lasted two summers before suddenly coming to an end. I never again saw my mother’s son. And I never met my father’s. I did not even know that he and Lynne had one, in fact, until three years ago, when one of my brothers mailed me a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Sun Times describing his murder. His girlfriend had stabbed him thirty-one times. In the margins, next to his picture, my brother had inscribed, “He looks just like you!” At first glance, I had thought it was.
I made no mention of my stepbrothers in the novel, nor of my parents’ separation, even though my mother, after speaking about this tumultuous period in their lives and of the resilient love that saw her and my father through it, suggested that I should. But at the time these details seemed peripheral to my point, too far astray from the topic at hand, not so much character development and depth, in my view, as dirty laundry. After chronicling how he’d lost his sight, I described how my father had navigated the sighted world: his learning to walk with a cane, his mastery of public transportation, how he’d earned his college degrees with the help of student and technological aides, his purchase of a seeing-eye dog. Chapter after chapter focused on the mechanics of blindness when I should have focused on the mechanics of being. I should have explored my father’s life beyond his handicap, just as, when I set out to write my own story, I should have explored my life beyond the trials common to inner-city black males. The novels I had written said no more about the range of my father’s experiences or mine, no more about the meanings we had shaped from the chaos of our lives, than the newspaper clipping had said about his murdered son’s.
I realized this while at my father’s funeral. He died in September 2005, fifty-six years after the surgeons predicted he would, succumbing not to the blood clots after all, but rather to pneumonia. My wife and I left our two toddlers with their grandmother and flew from Boston to Chicago to attend the service. We sat in the second pew, just behind my mother, whose shoulder I would reach forward to pat as we listened to the organist play my father’s favorite hymns. A cousin of mine read scriptures, a family friend recited a number of poems and then the pastor gave the eulogy, a thorough account of my father’s accomplishments punctuated by the refrain: and he did this while blind. As I listened to him try to convince us that sightlessness was the core and sum of my father’s existence, I understood that my novel had failed.
At some point during the eulogy, when I could no longer stand to listen, an incident I had long forgotten came to mind. I was probably thirteen years old, and my father, as he had so often done before, asked me to take some of his clothes to the dry cleaners. Ordinarily this wasn’t a big deal, but I had plans to join some friends at the park, so I whined and complained about being called into service. A mild argument ensued, which I lost, and a short while later I slumped out of the house with a paper bag full of his things. At the cleaners, I watched the clerk remove each article of clothing, my disinterest turning to horror as her hand, now frozen midair, dangled before us a pair of my father’s boxers. The clerk, very pretty and not much older than me, smiled and said, “We don’t clean these.” I couldn’t believe that my father had made such an unpardonable mistake, a blunder of the highest order, and the more I thought of it the more upset I became. Halfway home, swollen with anger and eager to release it, I started to run. When I arrived, out of breath, my hands clenched by my sides, my father wasn’t in the living room, where I’d left him but sitting on the porch. The second I barked, “Daddy!” he exploded in laughter, his large stomach quivering beneath his T-shirt, his ruddy face pitched toward the sky. I could not, despite my best effort, help but join him. I rose after the pastor finished his eulogy and told this story to the congregation. If I ever attempt to write another novel about my father, this is where it will begin.
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Jerald Walker attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an assistant professor of English at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. “The Mechanics of Being” is from a collection of essays in progress, “Notes from the Promised Land.”
Other essays from “Notes” have appeared in the Iowa Review, the North American Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Outsmart and Best American Essays 2007.