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We went to the playground court to find our missing fathers. We
didn't find them but we found a game and the game served us as a
daddy of sorts. We formed families of men and boys, male clans ruled
and disciplined by the game's demands, its hard, distant, implacable
gaze, its rare, maybe loving embrace of us: the game taught us to
respect it and respect ourselves and other players. Playing the game
provided sanctuary, refuge from a hostile world, and also toughened
us by instructing us in styles for coping with that world. Only
trouble was, to reach the court we had left our women behind. Even
though we'd found the game and it allowed us, if not to become our
own fathers, at least to glimpse their faces, hear their voices, the
family we'd run away from home to restore would remain broken until
we returned to share the tales of our wandering, listen to the women
tell theirs.

No book. Only a wish I can make something like a book about a game
I've played for most of my life, the game of playground basketball I
love and now must stop playing. At fifty-nine I'm well past the age
most people would consider the natural, inevitable time to give up
what's clearly a young person's sport. According to this conventional
wisdom I've been stealing for years, decades, stretching unreasonably
my time on the court, lacing on sneakers, abusing my body, running up
and down as if it never has to end. My three kids are grown and I
have a granddaughter in North Carolina old enough to chatter with me
on the phone and as I write these words a horrifically bloody century
has just ended, my marriage of thirty-plus years has unraveled, and
each morning my body requires more coaxing, more warming up to
maneuver through the thicket of old aches and pains that settle in
during sleep. Still, for some reason basketball feels important. I'm
not giving it up willingly. I dream about it. I'm devoting passion
and energy to writing a basketball book. Writing something like a
book, anyway, because for me what's more important than any product
this project achieves is for the process to feel something like
playing the game I can't let go.
So this writing is for me, first. A way of holding on.
Letting go. Starting a story so a story can end. Telling playground
basketball stories, and if I tell them well they will be more about
basketball than about me. Because the game rules. The game will
assert its primacy. I need the game more than it needs me. You learn
that simple truth as a neophyte, an unskilled beginner enthralled,
intimidated by the unlikely prospect that you'll ever become as good
as those you watch. Learn this truth again, differently, the same
truth and a different truth as a veteran observing the action you can
barely keep up with anymore and shouldn't even be trying to keep up
with anymore. You play for yourself, but the game's never for you or
about you. Even at your best, in those charmed instants when the ball
leaves your hand and you know that what's going to happen next will
be exactly what you want to happen, not maybe or wishing or hoping,
just the thrill coursing through your body of being in the flow, in
synch, no fear of missing or losing or falling out of time — even in
those split seconds which are one form of grace the game delivers,
the game is larger than you, it's simply permitting you to experience
a glimmer, a shimmer of how large it is, how just a smidgen of it can
fill you almost to bursting. When you were born the game was here
waiting, and the beat will go on without you.
I think of this game and see my first son, Dan, best ten-year-
old free-throw shooter in Wyoming, slowly bowing his head, his knees
nearly buckling, eyes filling with tears, looking suddenly so tiny
out there alone on the foul line in a cavernous Nebraska high school
gym when he realizes his best is not going to be good enough that
particular day to win the eleven-and-under regional-free throw
contest. His brother, Jake, at thirteen sinking two sweet, all-net
jumpers in a row from the corner to win a tough, tight pickup game in
the university gym when finally both my sons are old enough to hold
their own and play with me on the same team against college kids. See
their sister, my daughter, Jamila, leading her Stanford University
women's team, number one in the country, into an arena packed with
14,000 fans, a huge roar of rooting for and against them greeting her
and her teammates as they trot onto the court, then the eerie quiet
two and a half hours later, two and a half hours of some of the most
riveting hoop I've ever watched, as Jamila, totally exhausted,
collapses into her mother's arms after performing heroically and
losing in overtime her final college game.
Whatever you make of this book, I need it. Need it the way
I've needed the playground game. Need it like I needed this rain
softly falling now, finally, after a whole day so close to rain I
found myself holding my breath till dark in expectation of the first
large, cooling drops. A sweltering June day I climbed a steep trail
up a mountain and hiked through woods surrounding two small
reservoirs where people skinny-dip and sunbathe naked, as if the
summer of love never ended. Rain in the air, in the sky, on my mind
all day. Gray heaps of clouds drifting in, gradually trumping what's
been mainly blue. Then the sky scrubs itself stark blue again. The
threat of rain never going away, however, even in the brightest
streaming down of sunshine, and I can't stop needing it, daydreaming
cool rain breaking through. Need to write something like a book
because last week back home in Pittsburgh, in the morning I visited
my brother Robby who's serving a life term in Western Penitentiary
and in the afternoon of the same day visited in a VA hospital the
body of my father whose mind has been erased by the disease Robby and
the other prisoners call old-timers. Need it in this season of
losses, losses already recorded in stone and imminent losses, virtual
losses, dues paid and dues still to pay heavy on my mind, never far
from my thoughts whatever else I might find myself doing in this
transitional time, season to season, epoch to epoch, century to
century, young to old, life to dying, giving up things, losing things
I never believed I'd have to relinquish.
Playground basketball only a game. Why, given my constant
struggling and juggling to fit a busy schedule into days without
enough hours, does basketball sit there, above the fray, a true and
unblemished exception to the rules, the countless hours committed to
it unregretted. Why was basketball untouchable over the years as I
devised and revised blueprints for making the most profitable use of
my time. Why am I missing the playground game, yearning for it now
even before it quite slips away. Why when I know good and well it's
time to stop play-
ing hoop, time to reconcile myself to the idea of moving on, why do I
continue to treat these ideas as unacceptable. Why can't I shake the
thought that this break from the game can't be final. If I'm patient,
hang around, give myself a little time to heal, to get right, I'll be
back out on the court again, won't I.
If I knew the answers, I probably wouldn't need to write the
book, or the something like a book I'm pushing for, would settle for,
anxious it may be less but also hoping for more than a book. No
answers sought here. No book. My need enough. My desire to lose
myself in doing something like playing the game.
Growing up, I needed basketball because my family was poor
and colored, hemmed in by material circumstances none of us knew how
to control, and if I wanted more, a larger, different portion than
other poor colored folks in Homewood, I had to single myself out. I
say if I wanted more because if was a real question, a stumbling
block many kids in Homewood couldn't get past. It's probably accurate
to say that anybody, everybody wants more. But how strong is the
desire. How long does it last. What forms does it take. How many
young people are convinced they deserve more or believe they possess
the strength required to obtain more or believe they actually have a
chance for more. The idea of race and the practice of racism in our
country work against African-American kids forming and sustaining
belief in themselves. Wanting more doesn't teach you there are ways
to get there. Nor does it create the self-image of a deserving
recipient, a worthwhile person worth striving for. You need the
plausibility, the possibility of imagining a different life for
yourself, other than the meager portion doled out by the imperatives
of race and racism, the negative prospects impressed continuously
upon a black kid's consciousness, stifling, stunting the self-
awareness of far too many. Including black kids not poor. Imagining a
different portion is the first step, the door cracking between known
and unknown. A door on alternative possibilities. If you want more
and you're lucky enough, as I was, to choose or be chosen by some
sort of game, you may then begin to forge a game plan. If you believe
you're in the game, you may be willing to learn the game's ABCs.
Learn what it costs to play. Begin making yourself a player.
I figured out early that hard, solo work the only way to get
certain things about hoop right. Every chance I got I practiced alone
the shooting, dribbling skills other kids had somehow mastered. Fear
part of it. Fear of failure. Of humiliation. Love just as important
as fear. Unconditional love from my family. A sense someone cared,
someone rooted for me, someone expected me to do well. I didn't want
to let those folks down nor behave on the court in a fashion they
might be ashamed of. If I wanted more, I must risk failing, and it
helped immeasurably to know that somebody somewhere supported my
effort to play well. Would support me if I didn't play well. If no
one cared, why bother. Why beat myself up. Set myself up for
disappointment. Love helped me imagine I possessed the power to
invent myself, make more of myself, become a player.
Fear and love, love and fear raised the stakes of the game.
Engendered the beginnings of a hunger, the hunger driving the serious
players I admire most, who never seem satisfied no matter how well
they perform, players who consistently push themselves as if more
hustle, more speed, more brawling competitiveness is never too much.
Players who refuse to settle into a comfort zone, who won't accept
limits, who attack the game with the same unstinting voraciousness as
the game when it attacks them, consuming the best of their bodies and
spirits.
The pampering and privileges I received because I was male
and the oldest child in the various households of our extended clan
certified love in abundance and also stimulated my desire for more.
The slightly larger share my mother sometimes tried to slip me when
she divided a cake or pie under the hawk eyes of my siblings I took
not only as a sign of love and eldest status, as they did. The tiny
bit extra also reinforced a sense of entitlement. Without exactly
knowing it, I was beginning to single myself out, practicing in the
interior world of daydream and fantasy, where no one could eavesdrop,
how it might feel to exercise power and authority, fire and a voice I
had almost no reason to anticipate my material circumstances —
colored and poor in Homewood — would ever grant me.
Growing up in a world where adults heaped love on kids in any
and every fashion they could manage, the women lavishing daily, close-
up care and attention, the men leaving the house at dawn to line up
on the corner where work might or might not arrive, men gone from can
to caint, splicing multiple, piecemeal jobs into a precarious living
wage, where delicious meals were scraped together from cheap cuts
beaten and boiled to tenderness, from government-surplus cheese,
powdered milk, and canned, ground, jellied, mystery meat, from
chicken's feet, necks, gizzards, beef neckbones, pig's feet, a world
in which piles of shiny new toys appeared miraculously once a year at
Christmas, the holiday when grownups spent themselves silly, diving
deeper, more hopelessly into debt as if one morning of glittering
extravagance could erase all the empty-handed ones, in this world of
abrupt change, boom and bust, feast and famine where love on one hand
acted as a steadying, stabilizing force and on the other hand could
exert no control whatsoever over the oppressive economic environment
in which both kids and adults were trapped, without that love I would
have been a lost soul, but love also created a desperate hunger for
more, far more than the people who loved me could provide. Love bred
a dark fear of its absence. Because if love disappeared, what would
remain. Wouldn't the point be I didn't measure up, didn't deserve
love.
As a kid, did I think about my life in terms of wanting more.
More of what. Where would I find it. Did I actually pose similar
questions to myself. When. How. Why. Looking back, I'm pretty sure
about love, an awakening hunger for the game, and not too sure of
much else. The act of looking back, the action of writing down what I
think I see/saw, destroys certainty. The past presents itself
fluidly, changeably, at least as much a work in progress as the
present or future.
No scorebook. No reliable witnesses or too many witnesses.
Too much time. No time. One beauty of playground hoop is how
relentlessly, scrupulously it encloses and defines moments. Playing
the game well requires all your attention. When you're working to
stay in the game, the game works to keep you there. None of the
mind's subtle, complex operations are shut down when you play,
they're just intently harnessed, focused to serve the game's complex
demands. In the heat of the game you may conceive of yourself playing
the game, an aspect of yourself watching another aspect perform, but
the speed of the game, its continuous go and flow, doesn't allow a
player to indulge this conscious splitting-off and self-reflection,
common, perhaps necessary, to writing autobiography. Whatever
advantages such self-division confers are swiftly overridden when
you're playing hoop by the compelling necessity to be, to be acutely
alert to what you're experiencing as play, the consuming reality of
the game's immediate demands. You are the experience. Or it thumps
you in the face like a teammate's pass you weren't expecting when you
should have been expecting.
Writing autobiography, looking back, trying to recall and
represent yourself at some point in the past, you are playing many
games simultaneously. There are many selves, many sets of rules
jostling for position. None offers the clarifying, cleansing unity of
playing hoop. The ball court provides a frame, boundaries, the fun
and challenge of call and response that forces you to concentrate
your boundless energy within a defined yet seemingly unlimited space.
The past is not forgotten when you walk onto the court to play. It
lives in the Great Time of the game's flow, incorporating past
present and future, time passing as you work to bring to bear all
you've ever learned about the game, your educated instincts,
conditioned responses, experience accumulated from however many years
you've played and watched the game played, a past that's irrelevant
baggage unless you can access it instantaneously. Second thoughts
useless. Opportunities knock once. And if you think about missing the
previous shot when you're attempting the next one, most likely you'll
miss it, too. And on and on, you lose, until, unless you get your
head back into the game. Into what's next and next and next. The past
is crucial, though not in the usual sense. Means everything or
nothing depending on how it's employed and how you should employ it
strictly, ruthlessly dictated by the flow, the moment. Yes. You can
sit back and ponder your performance later, learn from your mistakes,
maybe, or spin good stories and shapeshift mistakes into spectacular
plays, but none of that's playing ball.
If playground hoop is about the once and only go and flow of
time, its unbroken continuity, about time's thick, immersing,
perpetual presence, writing foregrounds the alienating disconnect
among competing selves, competing, often antagonistic voices within
the writer, voices with separate agendas, voices occupying discrete,
unbridgeable islands of time and space. Writing, whether it settles
into a traditional formulaic set of conventions to govern the
relationship between writer and reader or experiments with these
borders, relies on some mode of narrative sequencing or "story line"
to function as the game's spine of action functions to keep
everybody's attention through a linear duration of time. The problem
for writers is that story must be invented anew for each narrative. A
story interesting to one person may bore another. Writing describes
ball games the reader can never be sure anybody has ever played. The
only access to them is through the writer's creation. You can't go
there or know there, just accept someone's words they exist.
While playing the game is everything in playground hoop, in
writing, if there ever was a game, it's finished before the reader
arrives. The written text happens only after the action it describes,
real action or imaginary, is over. Everybody's dead in a way before
the story begins. The writer may be dead too, even though the text
also and always enacts itself in a timeless, eternally present tense
of composition. Pity the poor writer. He or she's a benchwarmer, a
kind of made-up spectator who may or not be spectating the game in
front of his face, or other games, other places, other times, or a
mixture of the actual, of memory, wishes, dreams of game, a
fictitious fan like those created in press releases by promoters who
claim the arena's empty stands are full of adoring, paying customers
so other paying customers will be attracted. Though the writer seems
to be in charge, he's more like a coach who can't insert himself in
the lineup. The closest he can come to the action is sending in a
substitute for himself and reflecting the action from the sub's point
of view. He can lend the sub his uniform, name, number, but the
writer remains stuck on the pine.
In the early days of sports broadcasting, announcers at small-
town, local radio stations would receive a tickertape summary of a
baseball game occurring far away in a major league city. Based on the
tape's skeletal account, the announcer (President Ronald Reagan
labored as this kind of fabulator) would narrate the game to his
listening audience as if he were sitting behind home plate, observing
play by play what he was saying. Depending on the announcer's skill
(deception) in manufacturing details, filling in background,
elaborating in a colorful, dramatic fashion on the bare-bones info of
a scanty script, the fiction of a ball game would become satisfyingly
real or not for listeners. The writer's voice, like the voice of this
remote, radio, play-by-play announcer, pitches itself to the reader
from a site distanced from the action words describe — by many kinds
of distance, many kinds of remove, many layers of art and artifice,
illusion and lies that also keep the reader at a distance, multiple
removes from the action, many forms of remove the reader can choose
to think about or not (is this report fiction or documentary, true or
false, is the tale-teller reliable, am I listening to a real person
or a made-up person pretending to be a person, etc., etc.), but
removes always there, built into the circumstances, conditioned by
the nature of narrative construction.
Here's the paradox: hoop frees you to play by putting you
into a real cage. Writing cages the writer with the illusion of
freedom. Playing ball, you submit for a time to certain narrow
arbitrary rules, certain circumscribed choices. But once in, there's
no script, no narrative line you must follow. Writing lets you
imagine you're outside time, freely generating rules and choices, but
as you tell your story you're bound tighter and tighter, word by
word, following the script you narrate. No logical reason a
playground game can't go on forever. In a sense that's exactly what
Great Time, the vast, all-encompassing ocean of nonlinear time,
allows the game to do. A piece of writing without the unfolding drama
of closure promised or implicit can feel shapeless, like it might go
on forever, and probably loses its audience at that point.
Fortunately, graciously, the unpredictability of language,
its stubborn self-referentiality, its mysterious capacity to mutate,
assert a will of its own no matter how hard you struggle to enslave
it, bend it, coerce it to express your bidding, language, with its
shadowy, imminent resources and magical emergent properties,
sometimes approximates a hoop game's freedom. The writer feels what
it's like to be a player when the medium rules, when its constraints
are also a free ride to unforeseen, unexpected, surprising
destinations, to breaks and zones offering the chance to do
something, be somebody, somewhere, somehow new. As if the tape the
remote baseball announcer depends upon suddenly stops transmitting
and he improvises a home-run riff to fill dead air, then discovers
when the tape resumes ticking that some batter has knocked a ball out
of the park.
Given all the above, I still want more from writing. More
than a sense of being stuck on the sidelines. More than the
puppetmaster's invisibility. Something besides the defeated, slump-
shouldered dejection of seeing my team lose a game before I get a
chance to enter it. Not because I expect more from writing, I just
need more. Want to share the immediate excitement of process, of
invention, of play. (Maybe that's why I teach writing.) Need more in
the same way I needed more as I was growing up in Homewood. Let me be
clear. The more I'm talking about then and now is not simply an extra
slice of pie or cake. Seeking more means self-discovery. Means
redefining the art I practice. In the present instance, wanting to
compose and share a piece of writing that won't fail because it might
not fit someone else's notion of what a book should be.
One of the worst trials for Americans of visible African
descent (and maybe for invisible crossovers too) is the perpetual
fear of not measuring up to standards established by so-called white
people who imagine themselves the standard issue and also presume
themselves to be the issuers of standards. We're plagued, even when
we have every reason to know better, by deep-seated anxieties — are
we doomed because we are not these "white" other people, are we
fated, because we are who we are, never to be good enough. I need
writing because it can extend the measure of what's possible, allow
me to engage in defining standards. In my chosen field I can strive
to accomplish what Michael Jordan has achieved in playing hoop —
become a standard for others to measure themselves against.
So playground basketball and writing, alike and unlike, both
start there — ways to single myself out. Seeking qualities in myself
worth saving, something others might appreciate and reward,
qualities, above all, I can count on to prove a point to myself, to
change myself for better or worse. Hoop and writing may result in the
most basic sort of self-knowledge, but none of that's guaranteed.
They're about the seeking, the inquiry, process not destination. Hoop
and writing intrigue me because no matter how many answers I
articulate, how gaudy my stat sheet appears, hoop and writing keep
asking the same questions. Is anybody home in there. Who. If I take a
chance and turn the sucker out, will he be worth a hot damn, worth
the trouble. Or shame me. Embarrass me. Or represent. Shine forth.
But before basketball and writing came music. All music but
especially music performed by people who sounded like me, like the
voices of Homewood. Music informing me how much more there was to
being a black boy growing up than I'd ever have suspected without
music's intimations. Music carved space. Music spoke a language of
emotion, literally moved me, excited my mind and spirit, set my body
parts dancing. A language half understood, brimming with much more
than I could comprehend, but a language addressed to me, language
belonging to me because it described me. Even when I didn't know
exactly what a beat or rhythm or deep bass riff or falsetto trill
were saying, I was seized. I could recognize what amounted to ideas,
new information, trains of thought, revelations in Sam Cooke and the
Soul Stirrers or the Swan Silvertones or Dixie Hummingbirds or Hank
Ballard and the Midnighters. Though I couldn't translate the lucid,
shimmering counterpoint of quartet close harmony into words, part of
the magic, the freedom of music meant that I didn't need to turn it
into words. And I guess I was lucky or smart because I didn't try to
translate. Music escaped the net of familiar, everyday language, the
official, standard register of speech, the standardized sound and
sense that too regularly felt as if they weren't addressed to me,
didn't belong to me. In various degrees Homewood folks resisted the
dominant vernacular of the language, our speech played against it, or
you could say fought, since our ways of talking were intended to
detoxify certain features of the common language we felt unfairly
raised some people (not us) up because they pronounced particular
words in a specific fashion, people who, to our ears, flattened,
depersonalized the rhythm of their English. Put other people (us)
down who elided or decorated the pronunciation of individual words,
who foregrounded the musical possibilities of their talk, speakers
for whom cadence, repetition, tone, beat, metaphor, silence expressed
a range of meanings and messages others might pursue by expanding and
elaborating their vocabularies. The dominant language culture
disrespected us, employed the arbitrary authority of its speech
habits to mock our culturally inherited difference. Music assured me
there was more out there to experience than a world already wrapped
up tight in somebody else's words, words tangling me up in them while
they also perversely excluded me. Long before I met Caliban, I
experienced his ambivalence toward Prospero's tongue.
Good African-American music said once upon a time I'd been
fluent in tongues the music spoke, and becoming an adult would surely
involve relearning, needing to master these tongues again. Music
promised more. It named me, stole my name, changed the names of
familiar things around me, imbued ordinary situations with drama the
way Hollywood soundtracks pump up the ante of mundane scenes.
Transcendent is a word that comes to mind when I consider the
capacity of music to expand the parameters of experience upward,
elevating the spirit, extending the range of what's possible. Music
ushers in a transcendent reality. Yes, it did and does rise, did
inform my spirit, but music's messages just as consistently took dead
aim at my flesh. Penetrated down to the body's visceral core. Even
gospel, with its drumbeat and holler and dance roots, worked down to
the gut, groin, ground. Transcendent, okay, but better to say music
opened me — up and down and all around. Many years after leaving
Homewood I encountered a Byzantine icon in a Cypriot church, a
portrait of an angel with eyes all over, eyes on bosom, chin, wings,
hands, arms, hundreds of all-seeing eyes, eyes all seen once the
artist painted his vision. Pierced and transfigured by light, light
entering, light going forth from the angel's eyes, a nimbus of light
crowning her, and I think that's a picture of how music transformed
me as I learned to listen and began dreaming of making my own songs.
No, not transformed or transfigured. Those ideas a little too
easy. Just like the angel picture's a little too pretty. But I'm
working. Working to help you see what I mean because that helps me
see better. More. We're still on the more. Music said there's much
more to life than meets the eye and said you were born with a gift, a
faculty something like an eye or ear, and if you learn how to make it
pay attention, it will reveal much more about the more there is to
life, the more there is to you. You'll become different, you are
different when you pay attention. Everything's larger than if you
don't. Today I say to myself a gift was planted long, long ago deep
inside the music by wise people wishing the best for you, wishing
something extra for you — transfiguration, transformation — more for
you infused in African-American music by beleaguered people who
foresaw your coming and understood how desperately you'd need what
they'd sown in the music. People who'd used music to single
themselves out, to save themselves, music tattooing invisible
markings on their skin (like those electronic dots stamped on your
palm, unseeable except in a beam of infrared light you must pass your
hand through before exiting from the prison visiting room). Hands
clapping, feet stomping, a sway, beat, and keening moan, tribal
markings aglow when the music's present, identifying your ancestors
to each other, to you and yours in a vicious world that strips you
and mocks your nakedness. African people who honored something
precious in themselves worth too much to let anybody crush and found
a means to pass on this knowledge, this more, this other inalienable
part of themselves in the songs they sang, the rhythms thumped on
drums or flesh with hands, sticks, feet, the whole body's bump and
glide, lift and fall through air.
Finally, along with the music, also coming before and
informing hoop, there were stories. They were out there. An oral
history, so to speak, our version of who when what why. In somebody's
mouth. Somebody's ear. Staying alive.
The thing was, since they were out there, being told and
retold, you didn't have to think about them. Like money in the bank.
You could count on them. There when you needed them. All kinds of
stories for different occasions, to be told in particular places, at
particular times, and as I hung around the court more and more, I
heard the ball-playing ones. About hoop. About the playground game I
can look back and say, yes, it's something I truly loved, one of the
few things truly loved. Of course, I love my children, my blood
relatives, but that's a different love. I didn't have to fall in love
to love them, because I can't fall out of love with them. They were
here before I got here and will be here long after I'm gone. They are
who I am, all of us pieces of a larger thing each of us would be
worth less without. The larger thing running through the blood we
share and keep alive simply by living, by staying alive.
Playground hoop's something like that only it's not there
first time you open your eyes, open your mouth to breathe. Hoop's
like the people not blood kin you meet and love. You learn hoop. Then
you fall in love. Learn the game and play the game a certain way and
what you feel about it can turn to more than you ever dreamed a game
could be, a game that starts out as messing around, trying to
accomplish something vaguely challenging and fun, throw a ball
through a hoop, a fun, silly kind of trick at first till you decide
you want to do it better, shoot and never miss, pass and always
deliver the ball where it's supposed to go, jump up and never come
down. The more you think about getting better, getting to be the
best, the harder it is to play without dreaming about a perfect game.
Funny thing is, it's not exactly about being the one who achieves the
perfect game. You might be the one for a hot minute or in your mind
sometimes and that's enough to keep you working, trying, make you
turn up day after day on the hot asphalt so when the perfect game
happens, even if it ain't you out there playing, you'll be around to
see it. If you're real lucky and real good, maybe you will be on the
court every minute the perfect game's going. The hours and hours
practicing alone, just you and the announcer's voice and the cheering
fans you imagine as you attempt the game-winning shot, the missing
and misfiring and coming close and dragging home cause you got your
ass thoroughly whipped, the hot streak, the sweet, slick move to the
hoop so fine that if anybody had really been paying attention they
would have snipped it out of the jive game in which you pulled it off
and spliced it into the highlight reel of the perfect game, all of
this prepares you to fall for playground hoop. Then love of the game
rises like the ball from a shooter's hand, rising and you hope his
aim is true cause you know just as sure as you're up, you're also
coming down. You're not the shooter and not the ball and not the goal
either but you carry a little bit of each inside you once you start
dreaming of the perfect game, perfect shot, the arc, the wrist flick,
the net's sigh, how it flips up like the tail end of a skirt in the
wind when the ball drops through clean.
But before the hoop stories I heard lots of Homewood stories
told by the older folks in Pittsburgh and a few stories from other
places — stories, for instance, about Promised Land, South Carolina,
where my grandfather Harry Wideman was raised.
One of these precious few goes something like this.
When my grandfather was a little, little dusty-butt boy, he
said, too young to trudge off in the dark with the men and work the
fields from can to caint, from dawn's first light when you can barely
see what your hands are doing, John Edgar, he said, till dark again
when you cain't see nothing he said they'd leave him behind with the
women and him not fit for women's work neither so his job looking
after Charlie Rackett, his old, old grandfather some called the
African because he came over on the last boat and talked the African
talk, John Edgar, my grandfather told me, pausing in his story,
tilting back his head, cocking it to one side and closing his old
eyes that were becoming the color of his yellowing fingernails, Harry
Wideman leaving me a minute so he could hear one more time, maybe,
those old, sung African words before he told me more about his job,
about keeping an eye on Charlie Rackett, fetching him water from the
barrel, feeding him dinner from the pot the women left behind on the
stove when they trucked to the fields to feed the men on them hot-as-
a-furnace afternoons like it always was John Edgar a hotter heat than
youall gets up north here, youall don't know nothing bout heat, huh-
uh, nosiree, heat crackling the air, heat keep them hot salty
prickles all up in your nose, funny how being little sometimes you
don't pay heat no mind, you ain't sweating under no heavy, itchy sack
of something slung over your sore shoulder, ain't thinking bout how
many loads you got to make fore caint and that be why heat ain't so
bad sometimes if you little and why heat ain't so mean up here
neither, John Edgar.
After I gets old Charlie Rackett watered and fed and him sat
up dozing in his bed at the head of the cabin, smack in the middle so
he could see everybody come in or go out and everybody could see him
napping with one eye spooky open like he did, sleep or wake, soon's
everything's quiet, even old Charlie Rackett snoring quiet and
nothing, not a breath of air moving in that cabin, I'd slip outdoors
and commence to getting into whatever I'm spozed not to be getting
into, digging like I been told a thousand times not to dig in the
chink mud what hold them logs, them walls together, hold together
that little cabin where all us lives, from the newest born riding on
they mama's hip out in the fields to old man Charlie Rackett hisself
laid up in bed too old to work, it's my job to watch him all day but
soon's he's sleep I'm outdoors, digging like a groundhog where I know
better than be digging, John Edgar, and don't you know I found up in
there tween them logs a big piece of shiny money once I spit on it
and rub and rubbed a corner of it on my shirttail gold money somebody
musta hid a long time ago in the olden days I bet, one them African
slaves they say work round here before I was born he musta found it
or stole it and saved it for a running-away day or just saved it for
a rainy day what never come or come so rainy and quick it washed away
the poor African what stuck a piece of money in that hole tween two
logs so it was forgot till the afternoon I found it and laid it in my
hand, heavy and one corner shiny like I said after I spit on it and
rubbed it good. Thinking for a minute I'm rich. Think, boy oh boy.
Caint wait to spend it. I'm one happy little dusty-butt rascal. Next
time they carries us to town gon buy me everything in sight. Rock
candy and soda pop and chocolate peanuts and I'm spending up that big
piece of money fast as I can think of things to buy till I opens up
my fist and looks again at the piece of money laid crosst my crusty
palm. Ain't hardly going in my holey pocket, huh-uh, nosir. I'ma tuck
it right back in that chink where I found it and scrape up some chink
mud hide it again. No way if I keeps it I'ma get to spend it up.
Little as I was I knows better. Way too big a piece of money for some
little dusty-butt fella like me. Where you get that, boy. Say you
found it. Uh-huh. Where you been to find a piece of gold, boy. And
don't be wetting up your lips to tell no lie, neither. What you been
into you ain't spozed to be into. Give it here, boy. This not boy
money, boy. Hand it right here.
Now maybe they woulda let me keep it. Maybe I coulda spent it
any ole way I wanted to spend it, but what I did was take no chances
and slide it back in there twixt the logs and patch up the chink all
nice and kept my secret. Said one day I'ma come back and get you,
money. One day need you bad and come dig you out again, but don't you
know John Edgar your granddaddy never did, not to this day. Often
wondered if you and your mama'd let me carry you down home to
Promiseland one them summers when you was a boy, wondered if that
gold piece of money still be hiding there. Wonder now if the walls
still standing. If anything left standing of that cabin used to hold
us all man woman and child packed in way back when. Heap of people
living there when I was a boy and not a single soul I know of all
them folks still living anywhere. Your granddaddy most likely the
last one John Edgar and I'm getting so I can hardly remember anybody,
anything from back in them days and times. Last trip musta been
fifteen, twenty years now. Didn't think to go looking for no old
cabin, no old wall, no old money. Past the day and season be
traipsing through them briary woods looking for nothing. Too late
now. You a grown man with children of your own now, but when you was
a boy, sometimes I think we mighta walked back in there together and
found it.
I've heard just a few of my South Carolina grandfather Harry
Wideman's tales, and because there are only a few, each is a little
sad — sad because one of a few, sad because I never accompanied him
to the home place in Promised Land and now he's gone, it's too late
now, and this story particularly sad because his good luck frightened
him and he hid it from himself and sad because it's mostly about
missing him, missing a chance, but telling it here and now in this
fashion, trying to put his spin on it, trying to find written words
for his telling and of course not coming close to getting his voice
right, it's sad but not sad, too, because missing a last second shot,
losing a basketball game you would have won if the shot went in,
though it feels like the worst, the saddest possible moment and you
die a little, as awful as you feel, the world doesn't end, there's
more time and if you're lucky another game, and even if no more games
for you, there's the game itself and its undiminished power to
present such excruciating moments like the one you don't believe
you'll survive as it's happening, while you watch your shot fall
short off the front of the rim. On the other hand the moment, shot
made or shot missed, lets you feel as if your fate's in your hands,
lets you decide with a flick of your wrist whether something grand or
devastating will befall you, a moment of power, a chance to try, a
chance to put your signature on the moment, win or lose, and what
could be better than this rare, privileged moment served up to you by
the playground game, what could be more like living large.
More in my grandfather's story. A chance to imagine myself
different. Missing an opportunity refines hunger, extenuates it. The
hunger, in spite of missed chances, to play, to try again, to
appreciate what didn't, doesn't happen as well as what does, and
probably there's no other road to get there, to find yourself open
and the ball in your hands. Pen in your hands. Music, stories, love
singling me out and scaring me half to death because I couldn't abide
the thought of losing love. Needing more, always more and looking for
things I could do well, somebody special I could be in the music, the
stories, the game of playground basketball on its way next.

Copyright © 2001 by John Edgar Wideman. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.