Excerpt from “The Old Man” (for Kamden) For the first nine years of my life I grew up in a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, Negroes, and oddly enough, four or five Japanese families, an unheard percentage of Asian Americans in any neighborhood of the city, excepting, of course, Chinatown. And, of course, whether we were Japanese, Korean, or even Filipino, we were all Chinamen in the eyes of the children in our neighborhood. Ching-chong-Chinaman! You drop silverware on the floor, ping-pong-pang, that’s how they name each other, ha, ha, ha. The children knew best. It was all the same. You were a spick whether you came from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Santo Domingo, or Spain. You were a nigger whether you came from Harlem, Mississippi, Jamaica, or Haiti. Whites were honkies, even the Jews, except among the whites. I remember walking down the street one afternoon, hearing the taunts from across the street. Ordinarily I would have felt humiliated, self-pitying, even believing the deficiency implied by the tint of my skin or the angle of my eyes. But because my father was with me, I shook with rage, wanting only to kill, to rise up like the god of death, an eclipse shedding darkness, disease, destruction over the entire city, obliterating even myself and my father. Looking at him from the corner of my eye, I wondered what he would do. Of course, he remained unruffled, permitting nothing to perturb that distant, manly, even stately exterior of his that housed the secret of his dignity. No doubt, given his years in America, expressions of ignorance, blatant or subtle, through word or gesture, were common experiences of his, where he learned to rise above the pettiness and the pain. Oblivious to commonness he led me across the cobblestone avenue of Broadway, past Julliard, the Union Theological Seminary, Riverside Church, across the granite promenade of Grant’s Tomb, to Riverside Drive overlooking the choppy, slate-gray Hudson River rushing from the north and the promise of the countryside. This is what old Henry Hudson must have seen and felt as he sailed upriver against the current toward India.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 07:34:52 +0000
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