From “Colored People’s Time”
Gregory Pardlo
During my adolescence, my parents, my brother and I suddenly found ourselves financially insecure. We lived in what was, at the time, a predominantly white middle class community where each of our neighbors’ homes seemed a yodel away from an almost Swiss predictability. It’s no secret I wanted to emulate my friends’ and neighbors’ families. And during those formative, pubertal years I despised my parents for dragging me down with their misfortunes, their low birth. I wish I could say I’m over it. Most Saturday mornings now I sweep the sidewalk in front of my Brooklyn brownstone, remembering the phalanx of lawnmowers that would resound in unison like the Wagnerian cicadas that ratcheted their songs of call and response across the neighborhood thick with shrubs and darting rabbits those venerable Saturdays as I was growing up.
My wife Ginger and I bought our brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2005. The day we closed, our real estate agent took us to dinner at a Korean restaurant in Queens. She said she’d neglected to get us the traditional Korean housewarming gifts of toilet paper and laundry soap, but urged us to ask the spirits of the house for their blessing before we settled in. The house is more than a century old. If we’d had any question, if we hoped to seduce ourselves into denial, our new neighbors were not shy about lading us with the lore like gift baskets of fruit and wine: People have died in our house.
Everyone remembers Ms. Bailey, for example, whose parents bought the house sometime in the 1930s. Ms. Bailey was felled by a heart attack while tending the little front garden. Our current neighbor’s late father kept the house as an income property before it sat vacant for some time in the crack-addled 80’s. Who knows how many walking dead back then claimed space beneath the roof that is now ours. Kim, the medical doctor who rescued the house, developed complications from a bug bite and succumbed after returning home from one of her many safaris. The house sat vacant for a year or so until we bought it in an estate sale. This death business was new for me. All these stories of “before we lived here” made me think about what would be told “after we’re gone.”
Until we moved to Bed Stuy, the idea of home for me existed in a timeless present. People didn’t die in houses in Willingboro, NJ, where I grew up. At least not in the 1970s. They just moved to Cherry Hill. In Willingboro there was a sense that within one or two generations the prefab houses would be consumed all the way down to the concrete slab foundations, whereas Brooklyn brownstones are institutions. Ginger and I didn’t just move into a building and take on a mortgage the way my parents once had; we became caretakers of an edifice belonging to a different order entirely.
My relationship to space transformed accordingly. With the landscape no longer disposable, I grew sensitive to space-defining details: my Luxor Obelisk, my Washington Monument, myTour Eiffel. As if it were a quirk of OCD, I indexed landmarks that would mediate my identification with Brownstone Brooklyn. In the absence of structures that enjoy the leisure of existing mostly to organize space (fountains, gazebos), I considered those landmarks preoccupied with their own utility: churches and armories, for example. But God? Violence? No, the steeples and turrets didn’t appeal. Thus my obsession with the Public Clock.
The public clock is also a surrogate for family clocks, the heirloom type that symbolize a consistent and orderly familial rhythm, a rhythm that didn’t exist in the lawless confederacy of my childhood home. The families I envied as I was growing up ate dinner together at the same time every night. They had bedtime routines. Their ancestors lived among them in their sense of tradition, their ritual ordering of time. Perhaps my claim to public clocks allowed me to sublimate my envy of those families into some constructive civic-awareness, to claim all of Brooklyn as my family. There may have been no stately clock in my house, but I could take consolation in the fact that Brooklyn was chock full of them.
Gregory Pardlo’s most recent collection of poems, Digest, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize.
Ladowich Magazine is available in the Apple Newsstand — https://t.co/bhbBwDr0F9 — offering just enough poetry and one longread a month. The essay excerpted here appears in issue four, available on August 27.
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