By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th century real events could be recorded. You know the ones, the wars and glimpses of the makers of war. Watching those guys on horseback with long thick moustaches like facial mops, cutlasses drawn…or the infantry rushing forward in a frantic thrust, some of them dropping….yes, pitching forward in their tracks… or men plugging the cannons to fire the next fusillade… or men in the trenches plugging pipes with tobacco or whatever they had…I try to imagine them as real people, I try so hard…but somehow they always remain like shadows or engravings worn with age, apropos of something that might have happened only in one’s imagination.
It is the black and white medium versus the color that we are used to now that defines the recordable Long Ago. Kristallnacht still sends shivers up the spine as we watch those Nazis pounding at the door, and we feel the people trembling inside; we don’t have to actually see them. We know what awaits them. The black-and-white adds to the horror of the situation, but it also distances us. It was long ago and it was somewhere else. A nightmare that tantalizes our own dread of the dark, the bayonets that come with the darkened world of soldiers whose faces look like dead zones, enough to make us wake up screaming, until we see it isn’t real.
It was; now it isn’t. The coloring day spares us from a black and white reckoning with grey smileless soldiers, or those that grin with lopsided malice. Suddenly, their attention diverted by our blinding technicolor light, they stop chasing us; they forget about us, and resume their murdering spree, breaking down the doors with pitchblack death in their sullen eyes. They do the duty of darkness, the barrack bleakness of a mechanical vision somersaulting daylight can never comprehend, and it is their soulless helmets which now register as nazi faces, way before I was born to the crayons and the crib and the rainbows of my first visions. The world of black and white, there to see that the murders are carried out, waits impassively for my next visit, I, the fearful child of blue and red and green and yellow that I was born to be.
But the black and white past also has its seductions. I remember, for example, watching films of New York City and London and Paris around the turn of the 20th century (the 1890s or 1900s in other words), and I am always shocked by the optimism of the faces I see. They are busy living in the moment, human bees buzzing in the hives of life, and there is no death in them at all, death is so far away, so far away it doesn’t matter, and it’s all I can do to accept, with something morbid in me as I gasp: all of those people, every last one of them that I see in New York City around the turn of the 20th century…are dead. In other words, the whole city is dead, but when I seek their smudged images on a screen lit up by unreflective levity, they are dead no more, and in my dream I invite myself to their party. Ah, yes, it is the dancing night of another population’s joy and play – I crash the gate, a freeloader to another era. I lose my color and become also black and white. It’s the only ticket into their world.
And had I been there for real and not in a dream, had I but been there, I can imagine myself joining in and striking up the band and falling for one of those cocky girls who would dismiss all thoughts of mortality with a smirk of disdain, finish her drink and go to another partner if I even broached the subject. I would have chased her of course; ah those Speakeasy nights of coltish men and cocky women, lost in an alcohol haze forever. Except on film. In black and white.
I worked in a nursing home in Jacksonville, Florida, and I met many old people who couldn’t remember what day it was or if they had taken their pills, but they could remember what happened a long time ago. One guy had played in the same backfield as Red Grange, the great Illinois running back in the 20’s. There was one couple I remember, and they were allowed to share a room, though later they were separated for reasons I wasn’t told of; perhaps one of them took a turn for the worse. I don’t know.
But what I do recall is that I got to know them, and they were very articulate in telling me stories of New York in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I couldn’t get enough. I felt a twinge of guilt that, even in her mid 80s, the woman showed the innate beauty and gliding self-confidence of a woman I would have loved and probably been rejected by. The shape of her blue-streamed, sloping, still supple hands were woven of an ancient set of threads of flesh that told Beauty’s story. The man was gracious and kind, and, as if teasing death with the very instrument of life, enviably well-endowed.
Old and ailing as they were, they were together, they had stayed together, they had a kind of grace people like me suffer for the lack of, and I understood that whatever they had been, they had made that black and white film something worth teleporting into. They slept in separate beds now, because that’s how it is in institutions. What path of roses turning into thorns and thumbtacks had led them there to that antiseptic room I never knew. (Usually the kids are behind it, but you don’t ask such questions.) Whatever the case, they had no quarrel with the ‘regulations’. About that they cared less than a mountain cares if a wolf howls at it. (Or maybe it does, I wouldn’t know.) They had a wall full of photos of people they had known, entertainers and the like, back in the days and the byways, but for the life of me, as well as I remember them, I can’t dredge up from memory what it was they did. For sure, It wasn’t Vaudeville or Slapstick. They were neither Rhett and Scarlet nor Burns and Allen. Maybe producers, something like that. Above all, lovers.
For now that I saw them, sculpture scarred by time, noble, beautiful and defenseless in Living Color, it meant only that the continuance of what must have been love – their meeting and passion, their years and victories – had happened in penumbra, the way that Jimmy Durante, with his great schnozzola, used say “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!” – as he walked away in circles of light surrounded by darkness. That this would forever be my only look into their lives. They were better than me, those dancers from a noir noon world that put my own technicolor one to shame.I was treated to their leftovers, and that was still a privilege. Those lost nights in NY or Philly or LA, or wherever. And never once did it occur to me that, in reality, maybe their marriage had been fraught or tinged with pain, infidelity, and loss – love interrupted, even moments of enmity, discord, and silence. They didn’t tell me that, and I knew better than to ask.
Well, it was years and years ago, and that couple has long since retreated forever among the enveloping silhouettes and shadowy streets of some place called Manhattan. I am happy for them. They were safer there, for even Broadway is black and white in the grainy films, in the old dim world of lamps that pierced the dark only with white eyes, for there were no other colors; the colors came later, in blotches and scabs. And their shared smiles told me they knew the abracadabra that turns death back into life. Oh how I wanted to leave that prison room in the nursing home and run with them back in time, to a place where sons meet their fathers when the fathers were somebody’s young son too, and they play ball together.
My Russian wife has never been to America, and she wants to go. Her daughter is in LA now but their relationship has never been stable. So Los Angeles is out, but I have to admit that, of late, old memories of where I was born have started stirring. Specifically, Morgantown, West Virginia. And with all the serendipitous and visionary incoherence of childlike old age, I have started thinking of going back there. Not while my aged dogs are living; it would be too much for them. But maybe later.
I have long said I would never return to America. It is too contentious and riddled with issues I now find toxic and want no part of; in Bulgaria, we don’t have those kinds of problems. But Morgantown seems like it might be different. A university town, not too big, tucked in among the West Virginia mountains I traveled when I was a child. My great grandfather and great grandmother (Pap Pap and Maa Maw) lived there on a dirt road called George Street. Their house was at the end of the road between the Runners and the Castiles. I kept a photo of little Rita Castile for many years inside a music box I bought for my mom when I was only six years old. They had dogs in a big pen in the back, and when we would visit, I used to go and talk to those dogs.
I say visit because that’s what it was; Born there, I didn’t live there; we came from Martinsburg and then later from Charleston. I stayed with my Grandpa and Grandma, and sometimes Mom would come too, from another town, and we’d spend Christmas there together. I remember everything about that house, the front porch with the woods directly across, the steep (or so it seemed) driveway into the basement where Pap Pap kept his tools. Maa Maw sitting still on the davenport, her eyes already losing light, her long hair the color of tumbling rain. At that point Pap was repairing TVs and stuff like that. Every so often he would drive over to a place called Masontown, though I never knew what he did there.
Every last one of them are Elsewhere now, though I know a little trick that brings them back. You see, I have a special seam that runs through my whole being, and when I think with a certain aim in mind, that seam – which is more like a beam, I guess – opens up into places of the past. Making those dead people wake up is the easiest thing I know of. I’d like to go to George Street again. Maybe we’ll move there. I’ve done crazier things.
But we’ll be going to a world of color, and I know that the one I want is black and white and stocked with drizzling mist. Charcoal-flavored, like their old TV set that stood just outside the room where we ate, next to the kitchen, and the back stairs that went down to Pap’s work room. I see it all. The professional wrestling: Antonino Rocca and Hans Schmidt and Bobo Brazil.
Sure enough, one night recently, curiosity got the better of me, and I tried to locate old George Street on the internet, and damned if I didn’t find it, but it didn’t look a thing like the one I remember. Maybe it was a different George Street. If we go, we will discover the Morgantown of 2027 or 2028, or something like that. Not now.
But I am afraid it will be too bright for me. I am afraid I will dislike the garish day. I want to go back to a place where the blemish-exposing color will not come at me like an accusation. If that happens, I will never be innocent again, never free to cavort among the moving trophies where light plays tag with the dark, and they chase each other around the rooms.
My mom was so pretty back then, and they said I was a cute kid too, though in fact skinny, shaky, and often sick. We lived those times in a world of flamboyant sunlight and florid faces, or so it seemed in our Little Town. A place like Now, where it was always Today, Today, Today – before the grey and grainy comings and goings started up: a reel of film in a smoky movie house, and everything became yesterday.
