Autobiography: An A–Z

There is rust in my mouthThe stain of an old kiss.

—Anne Sexton, “The Lost Lie”

Arrests. Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. Baltimore, Maryland. July 4, 1963. We are black and white together and we shall not be moved. At the locked gate, hecklers screech. Cops are everywhere. White faces bleed hate. Our group proclaims, “Let’s go back to the bus.” We walk back toward the bus along a narrow creek lined with trees, the boundary of the amusement park. No fence. Voila! We cross the creek. We find ourselves in a flat grassy field, hot sun, carnival rides in the distance. We are shocked, without a plan. We had not expected to get into the park. We say, “Let’s go to the merry-go-round.” We link arms and inch forward, one multi-legged creature. White thugs materialize. They surround us, take off their belts. Shouts—distant—from the direction of the entrance gate. Our arms link tight. If one falls, we’re all down. We begin singing, “O say can you see.” Fear cracks our voices. But these racist thugs are patriotic. They won’t start beating us up till we stop singing the national anthem. We don’t stop singing. We sing and we sing. Will the cops ever come? Do they even know we are here? At last they arrive. We sink to the ground. In the paddy wagon we sing at the top of our lungs, “And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.”

Bottle-fed baby. I’m an identical twin, the third child born in 10 months to my teenage parents. “One time,” my mother said, laughing, “Pammy got two bottles and you didn’t get any!”

Coal. Coal is the core of me. Coal is the rock that burns. But what burned in me, what drove me to 20 years of research into the American coalfields? Coal fueled the industrial revolution, but what fueled my obsession with coal? Was it the memory of Pennsylvania anthracite rattling down the chute into my Scottish grandmother’s Bucks County cellar bin?

Dithering. How much time do I spend dithering? Plowing through e-mail. Going to Facebook to read about nothing. Surfing the Internet to see if I can track down an old lover I haven’t seen for 40 years. Reading a chapter in a book and then reading a different chapter in a different book. Sweeping the floor. Washing dishes. Sorting through piles of photos, wondering which baby this is, whether I should keep this snapshot, wondering what will become of these hundreds of snapshots when I’m gone.

Elvis. Elvis was king. And after Elvis, Chubby Checker, doin’ the twist. Then the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and the Papas. Back to Little Richard, the one and only. And after Little Richard, Jerry Lee. And after Jerry Lee, the great Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell. Then Dolly Parton, composer of 3,000 songs. The immortal Otis Redding. The immortal Bob Marley. Back to Bill Monroe. Back to Ralph Stanley. On to Jim Morrison. On to Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Coltrane. Back to Ben Webster.

First love. He played guitar. He sang “Laughin’, Free, and Gone” and “Oh, Miss Mary.” He talked politics long into the night. He was a student leader in the Student Peace Union. Thick kissable lips. He dropped out of school, moved back to New York, got into computers. He wrote me disquisitions about the test ban treaty, about the Cuban missile crisis, about the flotilla of traffic winding below his night window, about getting laid and sharing a smoke after getting laid. I dropped out of school and went to New York. We shacked up. Then we broke up.

Getting up to write. I get up to write. I write in my journal. I write to wake up. I write to drink espresso. This autumn I am writing in journal number 142. I write about nothing. But nothing can come to something, just as something can come to nothing. Every morning I...