+fiction. kenji jasper
The House on Childress Street
+ story copyright 2006, Kenji Jasper

“I’m the Lone Ranger,” he had said to me on one of the last nights I saw him, Christmas Day 2002. Seated in the cushioned metal chair in his bedroom, he faced himself in a mirror older than he was. His bedroom was not a masterpiece of interior design: a twin bed without sheets, an antique dresser filled with broken watches, a cluttered rack of suits, slacks and shoes that spilled out onto the carpeted floor.

He wore a bright red v-neck sweater over a striped dressed shirt, with a pair of gray double-knit pants. The toes of his suede loafers were cut away, to give them the comfort of slippers. Needless to say, he was not a fashion plate of any kind. But he was determined to remain where he was then, up in that room, despite the fact that his entire family was preparing for Christmas dinner a level below.

“Granddaddy loves you Ken,” he would always say, releasing the words into any moment of silence where it might fit. He would say the same to my young cousin, Jesse III, but rarely to any of his own children, at least not where I ever heard it. And I had never ever heard him say it to his wife.

I stood in the entrance to his room on that Christmas night, having given him the hug and kiss on the cheek he always demanded from me since I was a little boy. Back then, the stubble on his cheeks had been a frightening abrasion to one ignorant about the nature of facial hair.

“You doin' alright?” he’d ask me. Then I’d tell him that I was fine. Then he’d give me a dollar bill, which after a few years became a five, and eventually a ten. And then Mom and I would leave for home. But I always knew, for certain, that I would see Granddaddy Jesse again, even if his presence kind of frightened me. His self-enforced isolation from everyone was too strange for a young boy to comprehend.

But I was a grown man when we had our last real talk on that last Christmas. By then I had begun and finished school. I had written two books and lived in five different cities. There were no more ten dollar bills, no more requests for help with the $500 I needed for the red hot laptop I wanted to buy, or the trip to Mexico, or the rent money my shaky career as a freelance scribe made me short on every once in awhile. That last time we talked about life, and family, and how those who love a drug addict often suffer more than the addict himself.

The addict himself was seated a level below, somewhere between sleep and consciousness due to the chemical crawling through his veins. We spoke of another of his sons as well, the one who was watching his chickens home and roosting in the living room, as the mother of his first born scowled at his first wife, while he did his best to remain emotionless.

“I can’t be in there with that,” my grandfather had said of the various tensions just below us. “Cause that ain’t right.”

Christmas was the one time of year that we all had something to smile about, the one time we all tried to put our differences aside and just be together as a family. And yet more often than not Granddad did not sit among us, choosing instead to dine after we were finished, or to take his meal at the tiny table in the kitchen, alone

But that night I was determined to have things go down the right way. I wanted to see him and that red sweater of his at the head of the table, with my Grandma at the other end, and grace being said, and all of us being together as a family. For some reason it mattered more to me then than it had in my entire little life.

“You need to be down there,” I told him, still standing in the doorway. He stared at his reflection in the mirror as if the silvered glass were the gateway to anotherdimension.

“You’re the head of the family,” I continued. “We can’t do it if you’re not down there.”

My mother called for me from the level below with a question. And I promised him that I’d return to continue our convo. But in the midst of aunts and uncles, my first cousin, Jesse III, and Mom and Grandma, I never made it back up to see him. But when the time came to eat, when all of us were situated at the family table, Jesse James Langley, Sr. was at the head of it, saying grace and asking for a bigger helping of the best stuffing in the world.

My wish, the first of two that evening, had been granted. The second, for him to helpme with a book I wanted to write, help that required the two of us to travel to his hometown of Greenville, was not. I saw him one last time two days later, kissed him, hugged him, and told him how much I was looking forward to the trip we’d scheduled in March of ‘03. Then I was off, back to Brooklyn, and the struggling writer’s life that awaited me there. I got the call less than 48 hours later.

Fingers to numbered buttons to the satellite up in space that sent a signal back down through the heavens and into my Bed-Stuy living room. The receiving device, however, was in the “‘off”’ position, and the cords had been removed from the land line. I had promised the lady in my life a night without interruption, a night where she could have me all to herself, away from work, family and friends, parts of my life withwhich she always felt the need to compete.

I didn’t get the digital envelope until the sun was high in the sky the next morning, while I was on my way to cash a check, the last bit of dough I had in the world. Now that cash was needed for a purpose, to return to the place I’d just come back from less than two days before.

“We’re droppin’ like flies,” the man said to my mother, grandmother and me. He was in his 80’s, if not older, his eyes magnified by thick lenses in frames of a style that came and went long before I was born. He had worked alongside my grandfather, Jesse James Langley, Sr., at Washington, DC’s Embassy Dairy more than 40 years earlier. So, like the rest of us, he was there to pay his respects, to send a friend home theright way.

I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t even feel the urge as the body sat a few feet before me. I was too focused on my mother’s tears, on the blank expression I hadn’t expected from the wife of the deceased, on my father as he sat in a pew on the other aisle. I had to be in control. I had to be a man while the people passed to view the body. But the woman I loved then stopped before she got to the casket. The woman I then called mine turned toward me, offering the most compassionate smile I’d ever seen, her understanding absolute in a single action. She put her lips to my hand and the tears came forth, rescuing me from the most evil of my enemies: pride.

Michelle Clark, a friend of the family, sang her rendition of “I Got a New Home” thatreached the heavens, stirring the hundreds of mourners into a cyclone of the Holy Spirit. Scriptures were read, as were letters and cards from those who held the deceased dear. Prayers were said and the eulogy, the minister’s warranted excuse for impromptu sermon, was delivered. And finally, before the pallbearers loaded the body into the cab of the hearse, before the gathered multitudes left the church to become regular people again, the floor was opened for final words. And I stood.

Being before crowds had become an occupational hazard. My writing had by then brought me to bookstores and universities, churches and street festivals. So when they asked for those who had words for the departed to speak, I felt the urge to express myself, to relay what he had meant to his second eldest grandchild.

I wasn’t nervous, not even with the drying tears on my face. Those gathered needed to hear what I had to say. Deep down I thought that it would somehow make a difference in how the man in the casket would be perceived after this, his final day in church, was over.

I talked about how much he loved his grandchildren, my cousin Jay and me, and Jeanette, the daughter my Uncle Gary didn’t know he had for almost 30 years. I reminded everyone of the image most had of the man in their minds, of him seated on the porch of his house on Childress Street on afternoons and evenings, smoking a Lucky Strike and overlooking the property that he held the deed to, with the playground, the center of the neighborhood, just across the street. I said that he was a man who expressed his love through work, through providing for his wife and children, but not necessarily through the tender words that most human beings in a family need to feel like they belong.

The words weren’t as much for myself as they were for those seated around me, for his wife and children, and the former son-in-law in the other pew. My voice was the conduit for what they couldn’t articulate, a summary of the thoughts and feelings recounted in the five days leading up to his final farewell. Had it been up to me, up to my own point of view, I would have barely offered two sentences. Because within me, there was only a composite sketch of the man, a gray outline with little color for clarity.

I looked out at all the faces, eyes that knew him, each contributing a shiny penny to the bank of his memory. They agreed that he was a man of few words, that he was a soul the larger world might have overlooked though his presence had been so crucial in making our worlds complete. Somewhere within those sentences I came to a very important realization: that I did not know enough about the man without whom I would not be. I did not know enough about blood that ran through my own veins.

Within an hour the casket was lain atop its proper plot, adorned with colored carnations placed between its handles by the hands of loved ones. Then we turned to walk away from he who days before had been among us, trying to assess the hollow feeling in our souls as we headed back to the church for the repast.

“They killin’ me with this,” my Uncle Gary smiled as he took in a mouthful of someone’s homemade corn pudding, tiny pieces of the dessert stuck to the corners of his trap. With Black folks and food comes smiles and words. We took seats at folding tables adorned with plastic cutlery and pitchers of fruit punch. The widow sat at the head, dressed in the purest black I’d ever seen.

“So when you gon’ get you a new boyfriend Sally?” my Cousin Cordelia inquired. The widow exploded into laughter and the family followed suit.

My grandmother always joked about getting a new man whenever she and the Lone Ranger were fighting. We all laughed so easily because we know how much of a joke her joke really was. She is and always will be dedicated to the man whose ring she donned for the first time more than 60 years ago.

There were collard greens and baked chicken, turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes and choices between the many cakes that were delivered to the family house as an offering for our grief. It didn’t feel like he was dead, because we did nothing but remember him when he was alive, continuing the sum of his memories through our own mouths and words, spreading the energy that was once only his across the family name, further fertilizing its still rich soil.

I’ve come to learn that grief is protean, ever-evolving as it winds through one’s heart and head. It creates and destroys all in its path as it moves toward the crux of acceptance. I fully embrace it three days later, back in Brooklyn. I’ve returned through snow, sleet and the same ten pop songs played on 30 different stations in an economy class rental car with the handling of a child’s tricycle.

The A train to the Uptown 4 to Union Square, for a Monday movie to clear my mind. I walked from the last car to the first, scanning the faces of night crawlers like myself. A Latin couple canoodled in an orange double-seat. A thirty-something postal worker snored like a grizzly, his body limp against the side of the rustling train.

The train itself was an elderly arthritic, rickety and trembling as it crawled through the city’s digestive tract. But it got me where I needed to go, though at the time, I felt as if I was going nowhere. Too little money for too much work that there wasn’t enough of to go around. I had spent four years in a New York that was not the one I dreamed of, that was no longer a creative haven for anything.

I had chased rappers and actors, penned meaningless articles on records and films that went straight to the can at the curb. A third of my expected life had melted away and that was all I had to show for it. I could’ve been hit by a car the very next day, or had my brain skewered by a stray bullet, or been stabbed for the Guess brand watch my then lady gave me for my 26 th birthday. So little time on this earth and yet nothing was guaranteed. My grandfather had climbed the stairs to take his nightly bath and came out with a sheet over his face. Still, at almost 84, he’d lived a long life. But at least he had something solid to show for it.

This is just the beginning. To really get to know Kenji, visit www.kenjijasper.com and get the real deal on the quality this man is putting out.