My favorite thing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to the floor to keep from falling down. I come from a family of gifted laughers. My brother Walter has an explosive, knee bent, leaning backward with hand over the heart, blow the house down laugh. It’s a rumbling that comes up from below, ricochets off the rib cage, pole vaults into falsetto that lifts him up on his toes, opens the sluices. And it’s water works for days. My daughter Karma as a little kid would complain, her palms like ear muffs, “Uncle Walter hurts my ears.” With an interruption of that sort, Walt emits a ahhhh-that-was-funny sigh. Then remembering how funny, he’s off again. Walt had a great teacher, our father.
Non-laughing memories of my father are quick, clipped, piecemeal things: whistling when he hit the block, grabbing his baseball bat when a ring came odd in the night, chewing on his White Owl as he hitched up his pants and checked the shine on his shoes, running bases in Central Park amazing everyone with his girth and speed, screwing up his face to call us ‘nappy headed wombats,’ dancing with himself in the kitchenette with his eyes closed and his broke down slippers making shuffly noises over the linoleum, shifting to a weird octave when addressing white people, jumping up at the fights or in the Apollo or at the Palace when some stray gesture insulted his standards of showmanship, threatening us with the hairbrush with his jaws tight, inspecting the briny jar of pig feet for one truly worth a quarter.
It’s his laughter that I remember in long takes and full sound track. He had a particular 3 in his vast repertoire. An upper sinus, snuffly laugh accompanied by lifted, no neck, shoulders when he’d made a funny, which was usually corny, which made it funny because he was a major league funny man who could afford corn. A back throat cackle laugh that featured the teeth as a major attraction, accompanied by tears, followed by his Louis Armstrong handkerchief. Then the belly laugh and sighing that came out like pulled taffy when something crept up on him unawares.
Following a stroke and quasi recuperation, he was going to a dance with his wife, Janie, driving, and he told her to let him off at the place and to go park the car. She reminded him of the neighborhood, choke and grab muggers, etc. He turned to Walt and me and said, “What is she talking about, nature mugged me,” and cracked up. When they opened up his coffin at the funeral, he was wearing that put-on serious expression that was generally a prelude to a wise crack. I kept waiting. Then I figured I was to give him the cue, but I couldn’t think of it. Just as well. It was an odd enough funeral what with brother Walt at the piano singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Fatherless Child,” in that handsome, cabaret, balladeer way of his. It would have broke the old man up.
My mother is a reel-in laugher. When the spirit of laughter takes hold of her, she wants to tell you about what’s got her captured. You move in close to listen, in case you have to catch her as she dances about doing cute ballet things with her hands trying to tell you. You move in closer to what it is that comes straining through the marshmallows she seems to have stuffed in her mouth. Mostly you move close cause you want to hug her and join her there in that hilarious place she’s still talking to you from. Then she gets out what she wants to say and the balloons bounce and confetti showers and she’s wiping her tears and it’s a party. Then she glows with a high pink-bronze, very pleased with her capture and her release.
My daughter Karma has an elfin wit and a soothsayer wit both of which break her up into scatter-shot spraying laughter that does great things for her eyes. For a wind-up of the laugh she often selects from her Daddy Gene’s repertoire, a ha ha heh singsongy thing on a rising note at the end. Her Daddy uses that wind up to round out his field- holler-in-the-city yowl that she’s got a ten-year old girl version of. It’s very outdoorsy at first, then it oval shapes itself into a cozy Nat King Cole doing “They Tried to Tell Us We’re Too Young” indoors thing. Then the coda—the ha ha hehh inflection. Of course Karma, being a tall-like-her-Daddy person, also does the roll-around breakdown that kids learn in baby school before they get here: Destroy the Furniture 101, 2 credits. Cute at 3, at 10 a menace to anybody stupid enough to remain on the couch with her.
Laughter is very useable. It heals. It gives perspective. It creates breathing space when there seems to be nothing but soul-killing cramp and close-quartered suffocation. It signals the balance of that truism the elders palaver about—that nothing is so good it might not cause someone inconvenience, and nothing is so bad it might not yield a hopeful lesson. People with no capacity for laughter worry me. Like cops. I’ve wasted more good lines on FBI agents trying to pry them loose from moldy scripts of the “A former student of yours has applied for a job as probation officer and listed you as a reference”/“Your former husband wants to work for the justice department and we’d like to talk” order. And like tedious self-styled “revolutionaries” (neo- magic-marxists a sage at Atlanta U’s poli sci dept tags ‘m) who want to come in, drink up my wine, and categorically prove that Imamu is Lenin.
Despite the risks, I have great respect for my capacity for laughter and outrage. My heart is a laughing gland. But near the chamber of the heart is a blast furnace. And poking through the slats of the rib cage is a loaded gun. The combination makes for a peculiar sort of desperado writing some times. Desperado in the Webster sense of outlaw. In the Roget sense of gambler. In the Unamuno sense of deep despair and high hopes. I despair at our failure to wrest power from those who have it and abuse it, our reluctance to reclaim our old power lying dormant with neglect, our hesitancy to create new power in areas where it never before existed. Our capacity for compliance, group denial, and amnesia. But I continually observe our ability to keep on keeping on, transforming the chemistry of this place. And am heartened by our spirit, our gifts, our magnificence as we battle against invisibility and fractionalization, especially in our own eyes and in each others. We will not be domesticated. If convinced that the truth is in the people, one can afford to laugh.
Read another excerpt from “Working at it at Five Parts” here. That post was introduced by Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed who edited a recent Lost and Found chapbook of the late Toni Cade Bambara’s previously unpublished work.