Issue Nine
Lorraine Hansberry in the Snow by Edwidge Danticat
I slept through my first blizzard...
I slept through my first blizzard. Woke up to the sound of a shovel grating the sheathed sidewalk, our neighbor Mrs. Clark, clearing a path to her car in the snow.
Snowfall is a striking transition from one culture to another, more abrupt than leaves turning in the fall, but no less beautiful. There is a kind of harmony to the clearing, the sound of the shovel hitting the pavement heightened one moment by ice crystals then muffled by snowflakes the next.
No one on our block owns a large snowblower and the sanitation trucks won’t come for a day or two, my father says, because our block is not a busy thoroughfare. So the snow stays put for a while, like a thick white blanket over a lumpy bed.
Snow flurries are still streaming past the street lamp in front of our house when I wake up for school at seven AM. Daylight has been delayed and as the last flakes dance past the lamp’s rays, they glow like moonbeams. And suddenly I feel like I’m watching a nature show, where something exceptional is happening, like a dolphin singing or a musical instrument is being played in silence.
The only thing that’s impressed me as much as snow is grail. Some summers when I’d visit my aunt Ilyana high in the mountains looming over the Haitian countryside, it would suddenly start to rain in the middle of the day and out of the rain would emerge perfectly round pellets, as solid as road-side pebbles, but colder than anything I’d ever felt. Here in the United States of Brooklyn, these pellets would be called graupel. “Snowflakes,” according to one encyclopedia, “that become spherules due to rimming.”
Even my brother and cousin, who, at any sign of rain, liked to jump out of Aunt Ilyana’s house naked for outdoor baths, would stay inside when there was grail because they–we–had been told a cautionary tale, that each marble-sized orb might get larger and larger until they all became boulders and flattened everything. But as soon as the rain would stop, we’d all head for small piles of accumulated grail, stuff them in our mouths and suck on them as though they were glacial treats from God’s own refrigerator. Hershey’s Kisses. M&Ms. Other types of sweets that I have now come to know, that when I do pop in my mouth remind me of the frosty tang of our own kind of snow.
I would continue to remember grail in future blizzards, when the snow would fly around wildly as though being guided by a hurricane then gather in layers, slowly gaining in density and strength. In high school, my best friend Norma Autry and I would go to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens after a fresh fall in search of the best snow. Mostly a haven for greenhouses, flower cultivation and summer weddings, it was opened a few hours in the winter. Hooded with snow, the leaf-barren trees looked like ghosts, miles and miles of phantoms neatly lined up on either side of narrow trails. Sometimes we’d attack a whole field with our black rubber boots, leaving behind two lines of footprints and imagining that someone would come back later in the night to track them with search dogs and helicopters.
We had just read Jack London’s Call of the Wild in Mr. Swizohn’s tenth grade English class and one of my favorite scenes was of the central subject and character, Buck, seeing snow for the first time.
…Buck’s feet sank into a white mushy something very like mud… It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him… it was his first snow.
Norma had a huge crush on Mr. Swizohn, our bearded, redheaded English teacher, who once asked me to make a dinner reservation for him, en français, at the French restaurant where he was to propose to his girlfriend. Norma was devastated when I told her about this on one of our walks, but she quickly blew it off by laughing at the fact that we were long past the first chapter of Call of the Wild before realizing that the Buck in question was a dog. She also made fun of the way Mr. Swizohn recited long passages from Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, or The Winter’s Tale, passages that we too had to memorize for his class.
“Everyone should know a little Shakespeare,” he’d say before making us read out loud to one another as though we were actors in a play. I hated to be chosen for any part because I had a heavy Creole accent, which made Shakespeare’s convoluted language sound even more incomprehensible to my classmates.
Norma and I would test each other to see if we remembered our lines as we walked in the snow, reaching for even the most remote connection to our chalky surroundings, including Autolycus’ boasts of his imported wares in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Lawn as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e’er was crow,
The night before Norma had just seen a public television broadcast of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, starring Danny Glover. She loved Danny Glover as much as I loved Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte because they were famous “island” men.
“Why can’t we read that play and memorize those lines?” she asked, stomping on a thawing circle of brown dirt near the end of the trail.
Norma particularly liked one of the speeches made by the younger sister in the play, the rebellious Beneatha, and tried to recite some version of it for me, with the same emotion that the actress who’d played Beneatha, the vibrant Kim Yancey, had.
When I was very small…we used to take our sleds out in the wintertime and the only hills we had were the ice-covered stone steps of some houses down the street.
“Those things relate much more to our lives than Shakespeare,” Norma said, then added breathlessly, as she had many times before, “I’d love to come here with Danny Glover and not you.”
“That’s okay,” I’d say, “because Harry, Sidney and I would be in a much warmer place. Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica or Trinidad.”
Even as we discussed our famous paramours, I kept thinking of Lorraine Hansberry because she was a writer and I too wanted to become a writer, but also because she’d died young–at thirty-four years old–and I’d always feared I would die young. So whenever we talked of Lorraine Hansberry, we would walk the rest of our trail in silence, in her memory, dejectedly pondering the demise of the woman she had been and had yet to become.
There was a school next door to the house where we’d been living for a year before my first blizzard. Our first real house after we’d left the tenement that had received me when I’d first arrived from Haiti. The children had not come to school because of the blizzard. The snow kept on falling, immediately filling in each footstep that tread it. The flakes would no longer stick to the tall green ash growing out of the sidewalk out in front. In a few days, my father says, the temperature would spike up then drop, turning clusters of flakes into deadly spikes, icicles that would look as though they might pierce through one’s body and glide dangerously from the top of the head to the soles of the feet.
The path that Mrs. Clark tried to clear to her car has already disappeared. We had not cleared our driveway so an even thicker rug of snow lies there. A single moving car: a phone company van ploughs through on its way to salvage fallen lines, lines that even in the snow seem to stretch between ourselves and some far away place, perhaps to Buck, Autolycus, Danny, Sydney, Harry and to Lorraine Hansberry, cyprus black as e’er was crow.
–photo by dellas