The Office of Historical Corrections(19)

Claire is wearing a dress marked with yellow flowers. The first person to speak is a weepy white sophomore boy, who expresses how distraught he is to be on a campus that has been touched by hate and personally apologizes to the Black students on campus, which apology takes the full remaining three minutes of his allotted time. Claire watches Carmen, who does not look in her direction. Carmen is surrounded by two full rows of Black students, more Black people than Claire has ever seen on campus before—maybe, it occurs to her, more Black people than Claire has ever seen at once in her life. None of them stand to speak. A boy in a vest and fedora approaches the microphone and dramatically reads the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama.” No one can determine whether or not he is being ironic.

Robert has told Claire to wait for as close to the end as possible, to let everyone rage against her and then win with the last word. Claire waits.

She is only supposed to talk about Aaron if somebody asks. She is supposed to say accident as many times as she possibly can. She is supposed to say that he was one of her best friends and she is insulted by any speculation to the contrary. She has practiced saying these things as truths and saying them as lies. I killed someone. I loved him. I walked away. A warped version of that icebreaker game. Two truths and a lie, or two lies and a truth.

After the boy in the fedora finishes, two other white students speak, and then the microphone stands unattended. None of the Black students move. At first Claire thinks their silence is hesitation, but everyone remains still long beyond awkwardness—ten minutes, exactly. One by one the Black students stand. They hand their note cards to the Dean of Students, and then they leave. The Dean turns over card after card after card; all of them are blank. Handfuls of white students begin to stand, gather their things, and file out behind them. Robert is scribbling a note.

Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.





Alcatraz


Everyone had told me that Alcatraz was nothing but a tourist trap, but I was desperate that summer for anything that would give my mother a sense of closure, and it seemed fortuitous that the prison that had opened all the wounds in the first place was right in the middle of the water I could see from the window of my new apartment. I hadn’t come to the Bay on purpose—a string of coincidences and a life I hadn’t known I’d wanted until I got there brought me to Oakland. Still, almost since the day I had arrived, it seemed like the only thing keeping me from the island was deliberate avoidance. I felt like I’d gotten it backward. Everyone else I’d met who’d come to California from the East Coast was running away from something, and I’d gone and gotten so close to the sting of the past that it sometimes seemed like I could touch it.

I had come west to work at an experimental after-school theater and dance therapy program for children who had been abused. A friend I’d gone to college with spent months recruiting me, sending me literature about the program: smiling children’s faces, photographs of the Bay and the Pacific. I was sold on the adventure, on the postcard-perfect water’s specific shade of blue, but by the time I said yes, she’d decided to move to Texas to begin a PhD program. I went anyway—I was twenty-four and convinced that the life in which I made some critically important difference to everyone around me could start on my command, that the world was only waiting to know what I asked of it. I was anxious and exhausted all the time then, but I remember those days now as being filled with optimism, a sense of possibility.

The organization’s budget was so strained that our supervisors worked for free some months when we were between grants. I made ends meet tutoring and doing SAT prep for kids in Berkeley and Marin County. Two of our college student volunteers quit after working at the center for less than a week—one of them had her cell phone stolen and the other was cursed out by four different kids, in three different languages. My own first week on the job, a child had threatened to stab me with a pencil, but by and large I loved the work I did, the crayon drawings and earnest thank-you letters I got to pin to my wall, the way kids who used to greet me with skittishness at best, open contempt and hostility at worst, started running to hug me when I walked through the door.



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My mother had never been to the West Coast and didn’t like that I was there. We were East Coast people and this coast had done us wrong, almost kept us from existing. My great-grandfather had done time here—had been kept in the basement of Alcatraz, and been told every day that when he was dead they would feed him to the rats. He was eighteen then, finally of legal age to be in the army, except he’d been in it three years already thanks to a falsified birth certificate. It was 1920 and Alcatraz was still a military prison, infamous not for its gangsters but among would-be deserters. They were still building the parts of the prison that would later be immortalized, but it was already enough of a prison to be Charles Sullivan’s private hell, the one he never really left, the one my mother, God bless her, was still trying to redeem.

My mother was born nearly four decades later, born at all because after two years, the army, with the help of his appointed lawyer, admitted their mistake. They cleared him of murder and told him he was free to go. He took the long way back to the Bronx—spent years trying to make himself homes in inhospitable places—but when he finally arrived back in New York, he married Louise, the first woman who took pity on him, and they had two children, the younger of whom was my grandmother. I never met her; she left a few months after my mother—a brown girl in a white family—was born. When my mother was six, a neighbor told her to her face that her own mother was too ashamed to stay in the house and claim her. After she came home crying, Charlie Sullivan pricked his finger and then hers and pressed them together and said they had the same blood now and whatever she was he was too, but my mother was too young to have heard of the one-drop rule and the intention was lost on her until years later. My mother called her grandparents Grammy and Papa: Grammy was firmly assigned the role of grandparent because they all chose to believe her mother might return someday, but Papa was her everything. When she was thirteen, her Grammy died, and my mother belatedly came to appreciate what she had done while alive—squirreled away money before Papa spent it, saw to it that the rent was paid and the heat was on and everyone in the house had clean clothes and three meals a day, and that her husband stayed sober enough to work, except when he had the prison nightmares, and had to be kept drunk enough not to wake the neighbors with screams.