I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

3. Wrestling with Angels

3 w r e S t l I n g w I t H a n g e l S The last time I tried to save my brother I drove from Minnesota to Wisconsin on a gray February day. The snow lay in dirty piles along the roadside and my car plowed dutifully through the slush that covered the tarmac. I was feeling good. This time I had a plan. I had been dispatched by my family innumerable times to extract my brother from trouble, but always before these journeys had been adrenaline-filled flights borne of crisis, with little or no planning preceding them. When we were still young and innocent, I was sent to convince my brother that we really did have to remove the plastic swimming pool filled with water and tadpole eggs from his second floor bedroom even though the notion of growing our own frogs was exceptionally tantalizing. At fourteen, less innocent, I learned to drive when asked to please take home my brother, who had drunk far too much at a party hosted by one of my parents’ colleagues. With just enough sense left to fold himself into the backseat of his Capri and instruct me in the fine art of pushing in the clutch to shift gears before passing into a deep and boozy sleep, my brother never heard the grinding of gears nor felt the lurch of the car as I drove the ten miles home, praying for an absence of cops. Much later, with still less innocence, I drove like a bat out of hell to New Jersey to gather up my brother after he lay down on the rails that carried commuters from the suburbs into New York City, but was picked up by the transit police before being crushed; flew from one coast to the other to extract him from a crack house and 58 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND bring him home for one more round of treatment; telephoned every hospital in Oregon until I found him drying himself out in a psych ward. For a long time, I envied my brother. I imagined him immersing himself in oblivion, secure in the knowledge that I would come before he reached too far toward emptiness. I even tried the immersion once or twice myself, testing the possibility that I too would be saved. I was, but never wholly. And I learned that there are some things from which one cannot be saved; resignation to the misery and squalor of those wicked places in the soul is far worse, I learned, than expending the energy required to wrestle with the angels. I also learned that there are times when defeating an angel simply isn’t possible; one’s only hope lies in outlasting the struggle. As I drove through that ugly February day, I felt contained and centered. This time, I thought, I wouldn’t even try to extract Rick. I came instead with an offer of assistance, a support structure, I told myself, by which he might extract himself and his family from poverty, from the interferences of the state, from what I saw as the misery and squalor of their lives. And love. I came with the unconditional love of a sister and the intensity, the certainty, of that love carried me over the miles. The car jounced up the long driveway, through the ruts of snow, past increasingly run-down homes, until I came to my brother’s double-wide and the rusting hulks of scrap cars languishing beneath the drifts. He came to the door smiling at the surprise of my arrival, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were cool and wary. I asked him to walk with me. Having slid into a coat, he came out into the driveway and we talked together. I laid it out—the plan in all its exquisite perfection, down to the last detail. I couldn’t tell if he was listening. Always the master of non sequitur, he told me that he never wanted to make anyone feel the fear he had experienced the night he encountered aliens while walking alone through the woods. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. He demurred. We went inside, into the heat and filth. His wife and children gathered in the living room to listen Wrestling with Angels 59 as I pressed him to...