Epilogue
Summer came, and stillness. I packed my stacks of notes and photocopies into a box. His school transcripts. The Gould Family Pedigree. His Guggenheim application. The diaries, the letters, the letters, the letters. Photographs of Augusta Savage’s work:
The New Negro, Mourning Victory.
A copy of Harry J. Worthing et al., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,” in
Psychiatric Quarterly.
I dragged the box into a closet. I carried my books back to the library: discharged.
I spoke on the telephone to an old man in a faraway land. He told me he had some of Gould’s notebooks. I believed him. I did not call him again.
I still sometimes picture a door with the word “Archive” etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this. Allen Ginsberg is lurking in the hallway, muttering to himself in a haze of smoke, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.” I sneak past him; he doesn’t notice. I open the door and shut it soundlessly behind me. I expect the room to be enormous, and empty, and silent, and it is very big, but cluttered and blaring. The walls had once been painted white and the floor had been covered with a linoleum as green as the sea, but I can see only trickles of white and hardly any green. Handwriting, in black ink, curls across the floor and crawls up the walls.
I kneel down to read what’s written on the threshold:
The Race Question.
It’s the title of a pedigree chart that, starting there, at the door, has been drawn on the floor. It begins in 1619 with the rape of an unnamed African woman by an Englishman named John Blye. Across the floor, circles hitched to squares beget circles and squares, darker, lighter, lighter, darker.
On one side of the room, an 1889 Edison phonograph rests on a sideboard, its cylinder turning, its brass trumpet blasting a single sound, over and over again:
Scree-eek!
Near the sideboard, hundreds of black-and-white composition books have been stacked to form an unsteady, tottering tower, seven feet high. I back away from the tower and almost fall over a cardboard box tied with string and marked “Norwood Dump.”
In a corner, there’s an iron cage. Inside the cage is an old radio in a cabinet made of walnut, like a mantel clock. The radio is broadcasting Ezra Pound from Radio Rome. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.
“You let in the Jew…,”
says the radio. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.
In the middle of the room, beneath a vaulted glass ceiling, a gigantic white sheet covers something hulking. I lift off the sheet to unveil a sculpture made of plaster, sixteen feet high, and lacquered black: a harp, with each of its twelve strings capped by the head of a child, mouth open in song. The label reads:
Augusta Savage,
Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp),
1939. Made for the World’s Fair. Destroyed in 1940, due to lack of storage space.
I leave the sheet on the floor.
In the back of the room, a rickety bed leans along a wall, a cot, the size of an examination table, bare except for an old overcoat, tattered and stained and pocked with cigarette burns. I inventory the nightstand: a Flit gun; a bottle of whiskey; a pair of spectacles, shattered; and a book by Muriel Gardiner,
The Wolf-Man and Professor Sea Gull.
Shoved into the farthest, darkest corner of the room there’s a heavy oak desk and an empty oak chair. On top of the desk sits Joseph Mitchell’s typewriter and, curled in its roller, a piece of
New Yorker
stationery, blank. A Milton Bradley color top rests on a pile of newspapers and magazines: an old
Harvard Crimson,
a
New Republic.
Beside it is a bottle of ink, a fountain pen, and one last dime-store notebook, its black cover mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat. On its cover is written,
Property of
GOULD , JOE , and below that, MEO TEMPORE, THIRD VERSION . I open the notebook and read, in his unmistakable hand:
I would like to widen
the
Summer came, and stillness. I packed my stacks of notes and photocopies into a box. His school transcripts. The Gould Family Pedigree. His Guggenheim application. The diaries, the letters, the letters, the letters. Photographs of Augusta Savage’s work:
The New Negro, Mourning Victory.
A copy of Harry J. Worthing et al., “350 Cases of Prefrontal Lobotomy,” in
Psychiatric Quarterly.
I dragged the box into a closet. I carried my books back to the library: discharged.
I spoke on the telephone to an old man in a faraway land. He told me he had some of Gould’s notebooks. I believed him. I did not call him again.
I still sometimes picture a door with the word “Archive” etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this. Allen Ginsberg is lurking in the hallway, muttering to himself in a haze of smoke, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.” I sneak past him; he doesn’t notice. I open the door and shut it soundlessly behind me. I expect the room to be enormous, and empty, and silent, and it is very big, but cluttered and blaring. The walls had once been painted white and the floor had been covered with a linoleum as green as the sea, but I can see only trickles of white and hardly any green. Handwriting, in black ink, curls across the floor and crawls up the walls.
I kneel down to read what’s written on the threshold:
The Race Question.
It’s the title of a pedigree chart that, starting there, at the door, has been drawn on the floor. It begins in 1619 with the rape of an unnamed African woman by an Englishman named John Blye. Across the floor, circles hitched to squares beget circles and squares, darker, lighter, lighter, darker.
On one side of the room, an 1889 Edison phonograph rests on a sideboard, its cylinder turning, its brass trumpet blasting a single sound, over and over again:
Scree-eek!
Near the sideboard, hundreds of black-and-white composition books have been stacked to form an unsteady, tottering tower, seven feet high. I back away from the tower and almost fall over a cardboard box tied with string and marked “Norwood Dump.”
In a corner, there’s an iron cage. Inside the cage is an old radio in a cabinet made of walnut, like a mantel clock. The radio is broadcasting Ezra Pound from Radio Rome. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.
“You let in the Jew…,”
says the radio. “Scree-eek!” says the phonograph.
In the middle of the room, beneath a vaulted glass ceiling, a gigantic white sheet covers something hulking. I lift off the sheet to unveil a sculpture made of plaster, sixteen feet high, and lacquered black: a harp, with each of its twelve strings capped by the head of a child, mouth open in song. The label reads:
Augusta Savage,
Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp),
1939. Made for the World’s Fair. Destroyed in 1940, due to lack of storage space.
I leave the sheet on the floor.
In the back of the room, a rickety bed leans along a wall, a cot, the size of an examination table, bare except for an old overcoat, tattered and stained and pocked with cigarette burns. I inventory the nightstand: a Flit gun; a bottle of whiskey; a pair of spectacles, shattered; and a book by Muriel Gardiner,
The Wolf-Man and Professor Sea Gull.
Shoved into the farthest, darkest corner of the room there’s a heavy oak desk and an empty oak chair. On top of the desk sits Joseph Mitchell’s typewriter and, curled in its roller, a piece of
New Yorker
stationery, blank. A Milton Bradley color top rests on a pile of newspapers and magazines: an old
Harvard Crimson,
a
New Republic.
Beside it is a bottle of ink, a fountain pen, and one last dime-store notebook, its black cover mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat. On its cover is written,
Property of
GOULD , JOE , and below that, MEO TEMPORE, THIRD VERSION . I open the notebook and read, in his unmistakable hand:
I would like to widen
the
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