Evidence of Books Not Yet Written

When I begin a book I feel the immense burden of my own ignorance. I open my journal and fill the left-hand page, and then I fill the right, and it is clear upon rereading the words that I have only managed to capture a shadow of the experience I was living within my imagination. But it is a beginning. Unlike life, which treats rewriting as a criminal activity, the ideas in my journal are subject to many rewrites until what was once murky becomes fleshed out, round, clear yet with a touch of the original reverie which only ignorance can launch.

In the photograph of my writing journal which accompanies this article I thought I would attempt to reveal some evidence of these naive beginning story and novel ideas. In their own way they are the ancient shards of tongue-tied pottery which insinuate cultural histories—some, no doubt, greater than others.

The writing on the top of the left-hand page is me griping about my speaking schedule. I had been working on a novel, and when I have to set it aside and go on speaking tours I become disconnected from the novel and from traveling; often I know that when I return home and begin to write, the first few days are going to be a dreadful struggle to regain both a full conscious and unconscious embrace of the work thus far. This only results in feeling even more ignorant than usual.

Just below the tail end of this whining (which started on the previous page) are a blue tab and a series of yellow and hot-pink Post-it™ notes. Usually my writing is a bit more controlled, but I was speaking at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where my mother lives. I don't see her often, so I stayed with her. Usually we do a lot of talking, and I'm always looping the conversations back to old family matters and trying to sort out the history of how things happened among us. In her kitchen is a counter and she sits on one side and I sit on the other. She drinks coffee and I drink beer. The reason the writing is a mess may have something to do with the beer but the greater reason is that I had the journal on my lap and pen in hand—where she couldn't see them—and while I was keeping eye contact with her I was writing blindly below the counter. I have written five volumes of autobiographical stories based on my childhood, and I think that I have pretty much exhausted that material—but then she started telling me a story of how she sold the one house we ever bought (I had instigated this story because my brother claimed that one day he came home from high school and a moving van was in the driveway and movers were packing up all the belongings—this was a complete surprise to him and he always felt a bit bruised that nobody told him we were moving. Rather left him with a sense that it was an intentional attempt to leave him behind. I didn't know the facts of the event as I was away at college—or was in prison by then for drug smuggling—but I wanted to get to the bottom of my brother's complaint). My mother dismissed his complaint in a sentence but then she began to tell me about selling the house. It was located in an all-white neighborhood in Plantation, Florida. My mother and father decided to sell the property themselves and so they staked a FOR SALE sign in the front lawn. They both agreed that the first person to meet their asking price would have the house. But then the neighbors began to knock on the door. "Not to a Jew," one of them insisted. "Not to a Black," another said, "or a Puerto Rican." They made my mother nervous. And of course the first family who came to see the property was a Black family from...