The Only Light We’ve Got

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

—James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

It was a running joke between my sister, my stepdad, and me. “When we can’t afford to eat, we’ll just sell some of your mother’s books.” My stepdad’s Boston accent still thick after fifty years in Rochester made it sound like “yuh muthah.” He had been married to Mom since we were babies, so we called him Dad. When it was time to move yet again, the four of us would pack all of our belongings, including the furniture, into one truckload before off-loading into an apartment not much bigger than the truck. We moved almost a hundred times by the time I was out of the house. Sometimes Dad would go on another bender and lose his job, or Mom would go back into the psych ward and we’d get evicted for nonpayment. I never saw the four seasons change from the same apartment. During one move, we couldn’t fit an oval 1970s couch past the turn in the stairs. My sister and I struggled on one end, my dad on the other. Fed up, he sawed off the back center leg. When we finally got it inside, Dad used three of Mom’s larger books to act as feet for the couch. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. We’d laugh. We never understood why she saved them. They seemed like dead weight.

Each move, I double-stacked bookcases into tiny apartments, one on top of the other, then double-stacked the books onto the shelves while Mom and Dad went to the old apartment to clean up. Gina, my sister, was only ten months older than I was. We were as close in age as two siblings could get without being twins. One time, when we were about seven or eight, my parents were both out for the day. Gina climbed a set of bookcases like a ladder to reach something on top, and then she and both bookcases tumbled to the floor. She wasn’t even scratched. I yelled at her as we rushed to replace the books in haphazard order before our parents came home. Mom never noticed, and if she did, she never said anything.

Move after move, I boxed, carried, unpacked, and re-shelved hundreds of authors—Faulkner, Twain, Kafka, Miller, Crane, Baldwin, Swift, and Dante. My mother had a complete box set of Hemingway novels. I always put them on the shelf by size, starting with The Old Man and the Sea and ending with For Whom the Bell Tolls. I held those books so many times, their authors and titles were imprinted in my mind before I ever knew their importance. Red crayon covered the front of Faulkner’s Go Down Moses. Inside the yellowed pages, my childlike scribbles superimposed over paragraph-long sentences. My fourth-grade apology—sorry mom it was a accident—replaced the torn-off cover of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

________

When I was twenty-seven, I hadn’t been thinking about college, but a friend of mine told me it was possible, even then, in the midst of all that scraping and struggling. Gina had been arrested again for prostitution. Mom and Dad had separated by then, but they still spent most of their time together. The three of us lived in separate studio apartments within blocks of each other. Dad would call me up two days before payday and ask for money. “Angie,” he’d say in that Boston accent, “your mother and I need some money for cigarettes and food.” I’d scrounge up six dollars in change for them. The next week, I’d ask one of them for money to buy a loaf of bread and carton of eggs to last a couple days. There...