Triangular Road: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

being revised to death. A highly prolific, seemingly effortless writer such as Mr. Hughes could not understand a slowpoke like myself who could spend hours laboring over a single sentence. Moreover, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed being famous, he was concerned about the effect of my snail’s pace on my career. Publish
or perish wasn’t only true of the academy. The literary establishment could be equally cruel. My benefactor tried warning me in so many words of the obscurity I might be courting in taking so long to produce so little.
    He once lost patience with me. “Paul-e,” he cried over the phone. “Do you realize that I have a book out for every year that you’ve been alive?”(I was in my mid-thirties at the time.) “You better get busy.”
    He certainly kept busy. It’s said—and this might well be apocryphal—that up to the moment of his death in the PolyClinic Hospital in New York he had been at work on a new poem. It must not have been going well, because with the last of his strength Mr. Hughes is supposed to have flung his writing pad and pencil across the room.
    James Mercer Langston Hughes. Mr. Hughes. For me, he was a loving taskmaster, mentor, teacher, griot, literary sponsor and treasured elder friend. I miss him. Decades have passed since his death in 1967 and I still miss him. A poem of his speaks to that continuing sense of loss.

    I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began
I loved my friend.

I’ve KNOWN Rivers: The JAMES River
    . . . where the water falleth so rudely and with such violence, as not any boat can pass.
    —CAPTAIN JOHN Smith, MAY 1607
     
     
     
    R ichmond, Virginia. Labor Day, 1998. It’s a near ninety-degree September morning, summer still very much in force, but without the dog-day heat and humidity that descends like judgment on this capital city of 200,000 during July and August.
    A friend and I have decided to spend part of the holiday on the north bank of the James River,
close to where it flows through the heart of Richmond—or River City, as the Virginian capital is called due to the importance of the James in its creation. Spawned in the Allegheny Mountains to the west, “the ri-vah,” as the local folk call the James in an affectionate drawl, courses east some three hundred miles across the state until it reaches Jamestown, the museum of a town that was the first permanent English settlement in America. And after Jamestown, the Atlantic Ocean.
    The James. It’s America’s most historic river.
    This is the first time my friend and I have visited this particular stretch of the north bank. To reach the water, we find we will have to negotiate a riverbank that at first glance looks as high and steep and thickly forested as the side of a mountain. There’s a crude pathway of log steps to help facilitate the descent. Yet even with the logs, I’m finding the going difficult. Not so my friend, whose name happens to be Virginia, in keeping with the part of her family history that is linked to the Old Dominion. An energetic octogenarian, Virginia is managing the treacherous climb down
with all the aplomb of a seasoned outdoorsman. Small-built and sinewy, my friend seems blessed with a constitution that will permit her to reach the age of a hundred and beyond still fit in body, clear in mind and undaunted in spirit.
    Taking heart from her confidence, I follow her down.
    The old-growth forest of trees is so thick we can neither glimpse nor hear the river, and only intermittently make out the sky. Then, perhaps ten minutes into our descent, a pair of railroad tracks abruptly brings the log stairway to an end. This section of the riverbank had long been leveled and graded to accommodate yet another branch of the southland’s vast CSX Railway System that had once had its hub in Richmond.
    During its ascendancy the capital city had been both a river and a railroad town.
    A raised and enclosed metal platform