The Fugitivities, стр. 33
The last year, his mother’s sickness meant, for the first time, she couldn’t come to his games. Then, shortly after an away game in LA, she died of heart failure. She was sixty-three. He was devastated. For all that Nathaniel had accomplished, he felt he hadn’t done enough to do right by her. To make good on the hardships of her life. Women never get the credit that’s due them, Nathaniel said. How little they get recognized. And by folks that’s closest to them, who really, truly know what it took to bring another generation through. The world is what it is. Women who make everything, who allow themselves to become life itself as it passes through to the future, have the harder road. And who could deny that more often than not, it’s a road paved by a man without the slightest notion of where he is trying to go. Losing his mother was a nightmare, Nathaniel said. The dreams of basketball, even if he had won a championship, could not compensate, not even come close. Nothing else had ever anchored his life. She had held his hand for days, refused to leave his bedside when he had to have knee surgery. Now he would have to continue alone.
Staring into the future was like staring at a wall. He had made and saved enough money to not worry about bills. He could pay for the hospital, for the funeral. If need be, he could support Naia; she didn’t need him, though—she had graduated from nursing school and was living with a court translator in Montclair.
He was thirty-six years old and in reasonable shape. Yes, he had started to feel his age when he played, but in his mind, in some ways he’d never felt younger. The passion for learning that he had buried for years returning like a tide, rising up to roll back feelings he had locked up in a single word: ignorant. Even the sound, the way some folk said it, made it seem like just a different word for that other one.
His mother would have wanted him to go back to school. Basketball had been his world; looked at one way, that might seem like a good deal, and it was, especially for a black boy from the Bronx. But basketball was also a self-enclosed sphere of existence that could be suffocating. Besides, he could see that the sport was beginning a new chapter, one that Michael Jordan was going to make his own. The pages had already turned. He was a figure from the past, he never had a sneaker deal, didn’t know you could have one. Give it a few seasons and the kids would barely recognize him or his name. The machine was moving on, into an Olympic stratosphere of international celebrity and wealth he had never conceived. He still felt lucky. He’d had a good run. He had made the best of the gifts of his body. The question was: What could he do with the other thing? What about the mind?
When he and Naia had gone through their mother’s things, they had found, besides a study Bible, only two books. One was The Bluest Eye. Naia wanted that one, and it seemed natural he should take the other. It was an anthology with a strange title that appealed to him. The Negro Caravan. Flipping through it he found only one marking, beside a poem by Langston Hughes, where his mother had penciled in the words what I want to know next to the lines
When love is gone, O,
What can a young gal do?
He had never thought of reading poetry, and he felt a flush of shame that he didn’t know it was important to his mother. Shame that he had never heard of most of the names in the Caravan, who had written all kinds of books, not just poetry, but stories, essays, theater, history. He resolved to get his learning, if he could.
He found a night-school program at City College. At first, it was very hard. He hadn’t been in a classroom in so long and hadn’t liked it the first time around. He worried that he would stick out, possibly even be recognized and embarrassed by professors or the other students. But the students in the class and the professors at the chalkboard didn’t know who he was. They all knew he hooped. But that was on account of his height, not from having watched his games.
History was captivating. Nathaniel learned in detail about slavery and the Civil War, events and epochs he’d only ever had the vaguest notions about. He discovered that there were black writers and thinkers who had studied these things. He was genuinely astonished, and angered, that he had never heard of them before. While he was preparing his final paper, he discovered a history book in the library called The Black Jacobins. Something about the image of the black general on the cover intrigued him. He quickly realized from the first few pages that there was too much he didn’t know for him to properly understand this Haitian hero, this clue, he thought, to his mother’s heritage. The void created by her passing still lived within him. He found himself up late at night, pacing his room. He would stop and stare at the color photograph of himself that he kept on the wall over the TV. In the image he was suspended in air, driving to the hoop, his clover-green jersey rippling, his knees and arms held almost as if in a flying prayer, small beads of sweat on his forehead, his face locked in an expectant grimace. He couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. He wanted to change everything, to be someone new.