Disastrously wrong (or Chapter I)

This is the story of an invisible man. A man who attempted an act that is routine and common and has been performed by many, but which, this time, and with this man, went disastrously wrong. In this man, the everyday act of hiding was performed so well that it transformed, through a gradual decent so slow and innocuous that he could not see its progress soon or distinctly enough to stop it until it was too late, into an act of ceasing to exist. I disappeared.

I was born in the middle of the last century, in the barn of a farm outside of Kansas City, Missouri, to a fifty-five year old woman named Joyce Cassidy and her lover, Big Jim Sutton. Big Jim was a former slave, and Joyce, a woman thin as a piece of string, was the descendant of a slave trader. A slave trader who had made a fortune in the purveyance of his merchandise, enough money to set his seed up for generations after.

But not forever. The money was running towards its end, and this farm was folding close to bankruptcy. This barn, in which I was born, was dilapidated and unusable. There had been no hay stored here for years and no animals housed here for ages. The floor was cold. I know this because it was the first thing that was not uterus walls and blood that I ever felt.

Then I felt alone. Then I felt pain.

Joyce Cassidy and I were the only people in the barn the night of my birth. She had no midwives or doctors and no sympathetic family members to attend to her, not because none were available, but because she had taken measures to ensure that none were present. Her water broke during a society party of the type she often attended. Thin Joyce Cassidy had been wearing a white silk dress, flowing to the floor, off her thin shoulders. Her neck and her head stood turkey-like above the fall of silk and looked comically absurd: that thin neck, that narrow head, perched above the bulbous swell of pregnancy.

No one mentioned this though. The landowners, landlords, bankers, professors, television stars and the other sorts who attended society parties of this ilk were too polite to not pretend they had in their midst no woman carrying within her a nigger bastard. They spoke of the weather and the stock market and made clever puns from the names of politicians and quoted bits of Casablanca and the Marx brothers. A young white lady played the piano.

“It was such a darling thing for him to do, Mr Churchill laying his reputation on the line like that,” Joyce Cassidy was saying to Michael Povlosky, the half-Chinese, half-polish filmmaker, when she felt a clenching in her loins. She let out a genteel “oops” and then, never breaking her socialite smile, uttered demurely, “Do excuse me, Mr Polvlosky, but something has come up that demands my immediate attention. I must leave.”

She sailed out of the large chandelier-lit hall, a white silk cruiseliner, moving like elegant music towards the door. She got herself a taxi– she never drove herself after drinking wine– and it took her back to the farm. Once there, she asked the servants to leave immediately, only allowing them to pause in their departure to confirm to her that Big Jim had not been anywhere nearby looking for her. He had taken to lurking about the farmhouse in the night, begging for her attention. Everybody in the little town outside Kansas City knew about Joyce Cassidy and her penchant for young, virile, not-too-conscientious black men. She liked the feel of them on her skin. She enjoyed the energy of a young black man fucking a woman who lived off slave money. Most of the niggers knew what she was about, but they could not resist. It was enough that she was a white lay, but they could not resist the added political garnish. This is for four hundred fuckin’ years, bitch.

The thing is that Big Jim was too conscientious. When he heard that he had a child coming, he started to go back to the Cassidy farm. He said he just wanted to talk to her. But she would have nothing to do with him and spent the nine months of the gestation warning the servants, the police and the dogs of Big Jim Sutton lurking in the bushes.

He was not there that night and after she sent all the servants away, no one else was there. Just me and her– the moment of our separation growing close.

She went to the barn and heaved and heaved me out of her belly and out onto the cold, empty floor, where I lay bewildered, too surprised to cry.

She lay there silent too, for two hours. The effort of birth, for a fifty-year-old woman, was phenomenal. Add to that the fact that the birth was unassisted.

Then add to that the fact that this was Joyce Cassidy here, no ordinary woman. She had strength beyond her stringy frame, and though it had subsided following her delivery of child, it finally returned, and she could get up to her knees and then to her feet. She looked around the barn, then walked to the far corner, having seen what she was looking for.

The barn had not been empty. In one corner, there had been a small case, about a foot long, three quarters of a foot wide and a few inches deep. She opened it and removed a revolver which she carried with her to where I lay silent, and with which she shot me twice through the head.

She buried me, cleaned up the mess, went back into the house for a shower, changed into another white silk dress and returned to the party. I don’t exist, so I might as well be fictional, and being fictional, I might as well have a dramatic story of origin.