FAMILY TREE
THE TRUE DEATH OF ABEL PAISLEY
Harlem, 2005
Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death. Though you have never used those words to describe what you did. At the time you’d thought of it as seizing an opportunity placed before you by God, but since your wife, Adele, died a month ago, you’ve convinced yourself her heart attack was retribution for your sin. So today you have gathered three of your female descendants in one house, even the daughter who has thought you dead all these years, and decided that you will finally tell them the truth: you are not who you say you are.
You have spent the last twenty years of your second life living in a brownstone in Harlem, running a West Indian grocery store. Recently, you shuttered the store. You have given up on fighting your arthritis pain and are finally sitting in the wheelchair Adele picked out. You are looking out of your parlor window, waiting for your daughter, the one who thinks you are dead, to arrive. It’s been thirty-five years since you’ve seen her, so you study each woman who passes your house for reflections of yourself. You haven’t bothered to shave, press your clothes, or comb your hair.
You are ready to be still and rot. You imagine the death of Stanford Solomon, unlike the abrupt end of Abel Paisley, will be achingly slow; already it feels like you are losing small pieces of yourself daily. To you, old age is the torture you deserve, a slow, insignificant death, your matter dispersing into the air like dandelion seeds until the day there’s nothing left.
When you died the first time, you were still a young man in your thirties and had been working in England for less than a year. It wasn’t easy for an immigrant, especially a black man, to find a decent job back then, but through a boy you’d known back in primary school, Stanford, you’d gotten a room and a job on a ship. You had no idea it was just the beginning of your streak of good luck.
You and Stanford were the chosen wogs they allowed to work alongside the white men. Stanford complained often about London. He hated the cold. He missed his grandmother and the tiny village, Harold Town, where you’d both grown up back in Jamaica. You’d already escaped the countryside for Kingston, and from there, London. You felt free. That sense of freedom and joy only dampened when you thought of the family you left behind. Your first wife, Vera, wrote you long letters weekly about how you’d abandoned her and left her to become a dried-up old spinster. But you both knew perfectly well that it was her idea for you to go to England, where she thought you’d somehow become a better provider. Your son, Vincent, was still in Vera’s womb when you sailed off. Your daughter, Irene, a stumbling toddler. You had barely settled in when Vera’s first letter arrived, with the list of things she wanted you to buy and send to them. With every letter the list grew longer, and you worried that you would never be enough.
The day you died, you were running along the dock because you were late for work while a container was being lowered onto the ship. You stopped short when the container fell, dropped from the crane, and thundered against the deck. You were close enough to hear the screaming.
“Who was it?” you heard someone shout.
“One of the wogs!” another answered. “It’s Abel!”
For a moment you were confused, hearing yourself pronounced dead. It was like one of those movies where the dead person’s spirit stands by watching as a crowd gathers around his body. But no, you were certain, it wasn’t your body, so you boarded the ship. The captain approached you immediately and said, “I’m sorry, mate. No way Abel could have survived that.”
You almost laugh now when you think of it—the one time racism worked in your favor. The captain had gotten his wogs confused, looked you right in the eye, and mistaken you for the other black guy. Abel was dead, crushed under the container. Unrecognizable. But you, Stanford now, could turn and go home.
Perhaps it’s telling about your nature that you did not hesitate. You nodded and turned and walked away, quickly, from Abel and all his responsibilities, before any of the others had a chance to recognize you. Back in your room at the boardinghouse, you riffled through your roommate’s things and learned what it really meant to be Stanford. You and Stanford actually did look alike, which made it a little easier to forgive the fact that all the white people had trouble telling you apart. You were the same height, the same light-brown complexion, the same lanky build. You, Abel, did not arrive dressed for an English winter, so you had even taken to wearing Stanford’s clothes.
Of course, you thought of your family. Your wife, Vera. You thought about the two life insurance policies you’d purchased. The one she’d made you take out before you left, and the one the company made mandatory. You decided that you were worth more to her dead. Vera was beautiful. She would find a new husband, a richer one; the children were young enough to embrace a new father, and they would finally live the life Vera thought that she deserved, the one she had no qualms about constantly demanding of you.
Stanford had little family. No wife. No children. That was what clinched things for you. Stanford was raised by his grandmother, who was in her seventies and losing her eyesight. You could continue writing her letters, sending her a little money, and there was no bother there. What surprised you was how right it felt. At least then.
When you met Adele shortly after you became Stanford, you connected with her immediately. Like you, she was Jamaican and had left her family to work in England, though at nineteen, she was almost fifteen years younger than you. You were as drawn to her as you had been to your first wife, and she to you. The difference was that Adele did not try to remake and mold you. When you told her the truth, the very first night you spent together, that you had taken your friend’s name, she did not try to dissuade you. Instead, she avoided the subject until you proposed, and she said yes on the condition that you live in America. As if leaving that country would leave the lie behind.
Later, the guilt would hit her first, a few years after coming to the U.S. She had started to go to church multiple times a week and suggested that you atone. You remember having laughed at the thought that getting down on your knees could redeem you. But since the day that she collapsed in the store, you’ve been thinking about your past. You’ve been thinking about that word, fake, and you decided you were right to never use it to describe what you’ve done. You are a thief, pure and simple. It wasn’t Stanford’s life you had stolen, for he would have lost that regardless. It was his death. Where is his soul now? Circling the world, looking for a grave that does not yet exist? Isn’t it about time you give him his due?
Your granddaughter has taught you to use the computer to kill some of your idle time. It was easier than you thought to find your first daughter, to track her journey from Jamaica to New York.
You are thinking of the grave that bears your real name and all of the people who needlessly mourned you when Irene finally arrives, the daughter who thinks you are dead. She is under the impression that she has been called to your house to care for an old man in a wheelchair. That old man is you. You didn’t realize just how little you’ve thought about her all these years until you watch her climb the stoop, and all the feeling you should have had for your firstborn suddenly rushes through you.