Family Portrait

A blue-eyed, elderly gentleman, with a yarmulke neatly pinned to the crown of his head, stands on a New York City subway platform. His eyes emit a dim light, partially illuminating a small area of the poorly lit, subterranean station where he stands with his granddaughter. Nearby, a few commuters stand listlessly, their eyes glued to the tracks, their necks craning for the sight of an approaching train.

The man’s gaze falls on the subway platform, with its dark stains from a million shoes and coffee cup spills. He thinks of his clean, tidy apartment with its book-lined living room. He’s never been at this station, but there’s track trouble up ahead, so his train has made an unscheduled stop.

An apparently homeless man approaches the granddaughter. The bedraggled man’s worry-lined face has a dimple in the middle of the chin. A camouflage jacket hangs loosely from a pair of thin shoulders. A belt reigns in his oversized khakis, the extra material gathering around his ankles.

The man with the yarmulke squeezes the little girl’s hand. The gesture is a sign the little girl knows. She has come to understand that sometimes, her grandfather goes somewhere without moving. It is a special power that her parents have asked her not to speak of to anyone. The girl’s father also has the power. The child knows that her grandfather will never let go of her hand.

As if watching a movie, the elderly gentleman focuses his eyes on the homeless man, then sees the man’s great-great-grandfather, a dimple in his chin, turning soil with a hoe in a field beneath a hot Mississippi sun. Then the elderly man sees the outside of a dilapidated shack. It is nighttime. An overseer leans against the doorway, laughing with a companion about the furtive goings-on inside, where the field hand is being forced to fornicate with a house slave. The overseer yells, “Hurry up!”

The scene changes, and the elderly man sees the house slave in the same shack, lying on a bed of straw in the early morning. Sunlight pours through the doorway. Inside, a midwife performs a delivery, slapping the baby into a healthy scream. No one smiles, despite the happy occasion. Into the mother’s arms, the midwife places a male child, protected from the cold by a dirty blanket. The mother closes her eyes to pray.

The man next sees the child twenty years later, now a young man picking cotton beneath a hot sun. His mouth is slack with thirst, his lips parched. When he crouches in pain due to an infected foot, the overseer yells, “Stand up, boy!” The scene changes, and the young man is having sex at night with a woman he loves in a nearby field. Afterwards, they return to their respective shacks.

Scene change. In the woman’s shack, a baby is born, a dimple in its chin. After another scene change, the child, now ten years old, works in a store which his grandmother runs in Arkansas. He wears clean clothes. After he sweeps the floor and packs the boxes of apples just arrived, he studies a book. The scene changes. He’s a twenty-year-old employee in his uncles’ business, keeping the ledgers because he knows his numbers. He has a dimple in his chin, inherited from his grandfather.

Now he’s thirty, married to a seamstress with a kerchiefed head, whose seven-year-old daughter irons next to where she sits at a sewing machine. They live in a room above a haberdashery, which makes fashionable hats for the local ladies and fedoras for their industrious husbands.

In the next scene, the now thirteen-year-old daughter sits at a desk in a one-room schoolhouse for black children only. A fire destroyed the haberdashery, killing her mother. Her father, after losing his wife and home, is long gone. Half the year she cleans white people’s houses. The other half, she attends school. She lives with a teenage cousin in his room in a cheap motel, where the cousin recently made advances to her. She abruptly leaves one night. Soon she’s selling her body in town, a good job for a pretty girl who can pay for nice clothes and the rent on a room.

The grandfather watches as the woman, now twenty one, drinks out of a bottle which a young man shares with her, sitting in his Ford in a secluded area in Harlem, where the girl lives and works. They are laughing, and the man’s arm encircles her. She shows him a picture of her four-year-old son, a dimple in his chin. The scene changes. The son is ten years old and drinking whiskey in a bar where men encourage him to drink, laughing as he sways, stamping their feet, cheering him, “Keep going!” The scene changes, and the boy is twenty, drunk on a brownstone doorstep, barely able to sit up. Now he’s thirty, living in a shelter with other homeless people, assisted by kind, cheerful city workers who cannot help him in the way he most needs help. Family. A poor relationship with his drug-addled mother makes seeing her impossible. Now he’s forty, an outpatient in a city-run hospital that gives him a clean bed, feeds him three meals. A nurse offers him a camouflage jacket that belonged to her brother, now deceased. After his discharge, he returns two days later. 

The homeless man has been watching the little girl on the subway platform, her hand held by an older man with a cap on his head. She’s got blond hair and she’s wearing a red dress with a pink bow. Her shoes are black patent leather, with white ankle socks. Her eyes are blue and shining. She looks like an angel.

The homeless man lumbers toward the girl, smiling. He takes the hand that is free.

The older man is neither alarmed nor pleased. He is showing a fearlessness and compassion that he practices daily, his trademark. He is well-respected in his temple for his humanity.

The little girl looks at her grandfather for reassurance. The grandfather nods. The girl smiles up at the homeless man.

If a passerby snapped a cellphone picture, it might show a family portrait, albeit an unusual one.

“Leave her alone!” The shout comes from a man with tattooed, muscular arms, wearing a sleeveless tee shirt. A gold earring decorates an ear, and a thin gold necklace hangs from a neck thick from pumping iron.

He cuffs the homeless man in the head, then knees him into submission. A minute later, three uniformed policemen run onto the scene—they run so fast, they seem to be flying. One policeman yells, “Make way!” to the few pedestrians standing around, uncertain what to do.

The muscled man straddles the homeless man, who is lying on his stomach, his eyes staring out of an uncomprehending face. His breathing is labored. He gasps, “My chest hurts. I think my rib is broken!” 

 A policeman orders the homeless man's attacker to "Get off!" Then he roughly turns the homeless man over, pulling his arms back despite a fierce cry of pain, handcuffing his hands, which then dangle, unresisting.

Some people standing nearby protest. “Leave him alone!” “Why are you being so rough!” “The man has rights!” Other people merely stare, horrified.

More uniformed policemen arrive. One of them, with red hair and a freckled face, displays his badge to the crowd, asking who saw it happen. Our man steps forward.

“I did.”

The policeman asks his name.

“Don’t hurt him,” the grandfather says calmly. 

“Name?”

He gives his name. “Did you hear me?”

“Address?” The policeman’s pen is poised above a form that needs completing. “What happened?"

“He took my granddaughter’s hand,” said the elderly man. “He committed no crime.”

The policeman asks, “Want to press charges?

“No,” the grandfather says.

 “You sure?” the officer asks.

“Yes,” says the grandfather, firmly.

“He might have hurt her,” he says.

“I don’t think so,” says the grandfather. 

The policeman looks disbelieving. “I guess you can see the future.” 

“No, the past,” says our man.

“Stay home next time, old man!” the policeman advises.

“What’s your name and badge number?” the grandfather asks.

"None of your business!” says the officer, who has turned his back on the grandfather.

The grandfather trains his blue eyes on the policeman's back. His grasp tightens on the little girl’s hand. The area around him visibly brightens, as if a tiny light had been turned on.

“What’s your name and badge number?” the grandfather calls after the retreating figure.

Over his shoulder, the cop yells, “Don’t bother to call!” 

The grandfather shouts, “Oh, I will!”

Now the elderly man is watching a terrified little boy, with a crop of red hair and a nose filled with freckles, hiding in the cargo area of a freighter making its way from Ireland. It is bound for New York.

But the policeman is no longer listening.