Anna Sears

Georges

In June 1957, at my childhood's frothy peak, Mama and I took the Chief from Lamy, New Mexico, to Los An-geles. A porter brought our luggage to the day coach. “Thank you, George,” said Mama, dropping a dime into his startling pink palm.

Arizona flowed effortlessly past the white linen table-cloth as I ate famous train oatmeal from a silver-plated bowl placed before me by a large black man wearing a white uniform and a white smile. Mama called him George.

When the desert stopped and houses got closer together, Mama and I sat up, put on our hats, pulled on our white gloves, closed our cosmetic cases and set them on our laps, and sat there until the train pulled into Union Station three hours later. We had not known there were so many people in the world. A porter helped us down off the train. “Thank you, George,” said Mama and gave him a dime.  

Mama and I sat down on curly metal chairs in a cafe right in the middle of lofty Union Station. I was allowed to take off my white gloves and eat a piece of chocolate chiffon pie. A dainty gentleman announced that he just had to come over and tell us that I was the most well behaved child he had ever seen. It was the happiest moment of my life so far.  I was eating chocolate chiffon pie, tomorrow I would see the ocean for the first time, and I was, quite possibly, the most well behaved child in Los Angeles.

I did wonder some about the Georges though, especially on the way home to New Mexico, and I thought for a while I had it figured out: I knew Spanish children promised from birth by their parents to the Church and sometimes given names that showed that intention.  Perhaps in Colored families, they named a son George in order to promise him to the Railroad.  

Who Killed Donald Goines?  

He's pretty gold-skinned for a Black child, sorting soiled whites in his try-to-pass Daddy's Detroit dry cleaners. Donald dreams himself Bad and Black and so doctors his big sister's birth certificate to join the Korean War.  He goes at fifteen to the Far East where Golden girls introduce him to the White Bitch Goddess he'll worship unto death.  

Never gets far in crime himself: tries to hold up a bingo game but his own Momma unexpectedly stands up and starts slapping her naughty boy; thinks he's a pimp until he hits the small town; runs a still, but the still blows up.

His first book from prison: Whoreson, his second: Dopefiend. Iceberg Slim’s publisher, the Man on Melrose, turns Donald into the mainstay of his new line of “Black Experience” writers. Donald writes Bad, he writes Black, and they just keep coming: three, four, five a year: Black Gangster, Street Players, White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief, Black Girl Lost, Eldorado Red, Swamp Man, Never Die Alone, Crime Partners, Death List, Daddy Cool, Cry Revenge!, Kenyatta's Escape...Donald always needs a fix. 

Each future million-seller he writes makes the author, actuarially speaking, bottom-line, worth less. Donald loses big in Vegas. The Man on Melrose steps in to arrange a loan to Donald—a loan from the Mob. As winter clenches down on Detroit, Donald smells payback in the wind and writes his will at thirty-eight. In Kenyatta's Last Hit, he kills his only hero. When his own Daddy dies, Donald writes “I'm next.”

Two men hit the house on the night of October 21, 1974. (Remember that date.) Donald's woman, Shirley, dies “shut up, bitch” style with bullets to her mouth. The killers have to struggle with Donald to keep his face nice for the picture in the casket on the cover of the biography the Man on Melrose publishes in 1974 . . .  but it takes only minutes to transform a prolific junkie into a legend of Bad and Black . . . into a smiling Buddha of pure, solid gold.

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Anna Sears is the poetry editor of Caveat Lector. She has also written a novel, Exile.