Free Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem Page A

New Yorkese, you are free to melt into the Caucasian Nothing, so why don’t you? Cicero’s path of grace in life had been to distinguish the saddles he could buck off from the hide beneath and the brands and scars thereupon, those emblems he’d be forced to bear forever. Sunnyside and the whole of Queens, Rose and Miriam Zimmer, disappointed Reds, Lenny Angrush and his various madnesses—enough. These were saddles. Cicero had put them aside. At fifty-six he deserved to.
    Why should Cicero Lookins choose to be Sergius Gogan’s magical Negro, his Bagger Vance, his Obama to entice him through a “teachable moment”? Well, Cicero was everyone’s, he supposed. A career magical Negro. That was his franchise here at Baginstock College, as it had been at Princeton to begin with. A compass for the soul journeys of the straight white folks. Cicero was an expert at pointing the compass’s needle where he wanted, knew just how often to use the forbidden word to keep them scandalized and when merely to titillate them with
Negro
or
negritude
instead.
    Once upon a time, Cicero Lookins had fled the world Sergius now asked after. Fled from Sergius’s grandmother, Rose Zimmer. After high school he’d slipped Rose’s clutches, escaped like her daughter, Miriam—Sergius’s mom—did before him. Ran from New York City to Princeton, to academia. His scholastic excellence was an offering to gratify Rose: She’d produced a marvel! A black brain! But it also got Cicero away from her, freed him to produce his own marvels to dismay and aggrieve her, perversions of sexuality and theory. One of his minor revenges: Rose’s Marxism quit at Marx. When Cicero’d one time popped a little Deleuze and Guattari on her ass, she’d balked.
    After grad school, Cicero ran west, to the University of Oregon, propelling himself far from Jews, far from Harlem and negritude, to a place where he could be sheerly non sequitur, an alien emissary on the frontier. The Weirdest Fish in any Small Pond. Then to Bloomington, Indiana, a better gig. Indiana was a little Ku-Kluxian for Cicero, though. He could smell old nooses rotting in the barn eaves. Soon Baginstock College rode to the rescue, offering a lighter teaching load in exchange for being the town of Cumbow’s tame bear. Coastal Maine recalled what he liked best in Oregon, that stony libertarian spaciness, the submission of human life to the landscape. So Cicero ran to the town’s edge, bought the most expensive house on Cumbow Cove he could persuade the Realtors to show him, to be a fuck-you blight on the neighboring trophy homes. And here, as often as possible, he escaped to the sea. Once, out with him on the waters, a colleague mentioned that in a certain Native American language the word for ocean translated as
the medicine
. Cicero had never wished to look into the authenticity of this fact, he liked it too much.
    Now here, immersed in his medicine, off the coast of everything, Rose Zimmer’s grandson had come to bother him.
    “I hate her,” blurted Cicero’s smoldering charcoal of a head.
    “Who?”
    “Rose.”
    “She’s dead.” Sergius spoke as if he thought Cicero had led them this distance to sea for fear Rose would overhear them on the shore, and he wanted to reassure Cicero this was impossible.
    “Hated, then.”
    “You were with her to the end.”
    With
her? The word, however seemingly neutral, suggested a certain agency. Cicero’d known people who’d been
with
Rose Zimmer, notably his own father, a choice Cicero might never forgive. Cicero himself was under Rose and endured Rose. With Rose in the sense that the earth was with its weather.
    And that was when Cicero heard himself begin to rant.
    “It isn’t just me, Sergius. All Sunnyside hated Rose. No one could confront her in the smallest regard except your mother. But your mother’s confrontations died in Rose’s silences, they died before the receiver was back in its cradle. Meeting her as a defenseless child, mytongue