Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography.

Robert B. Stepto. Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. Boston: Beacon P, 1998. 209 pp. $23.00.

Like the most engaging autobiographies, Robert Burns Stepto's Blue as the Lake moves from recapitulating the past to anticipating the future. The book is an unabashedly "personal geography" organized around Stepto's desire to locate his evolving self over the first fifty-some years of his life and in the lives of his ancestors. The focus is place, the theme the intersection of space and time in the writer's personality. The book passes from "Idlewild," the opening essay's account of boyhood summers at a black resort village up in Michigan--more truly home to Stepto's grandparents than to his parents--to "Vineyard," the grown man's realization and imagination of life under his own aegis on Martha's Vineyard. Stepto's vivid evocation of several changing and unchanging natural and social landscapes parallels his book's conscientious inner geography, the mapping of a self still very much in progress. After hinting at his mother's lonely restlessness and laying bare his father's emotional homelessness in the midst of abundant, fine possessions, Stepto makes explicit his resolve to enact his grandfather Ocie Burns's dream of serenity. In his time and place Stepto follows his ancestor's example of learning how to be at home in his skin and in the world around him.

Blue as the Lake consists of nine essays, five of them previously published. Part I, "Paths of One's Invention," maps the topography of the author's boyhood and youth in Chicago, where his family's gradual prosperity is mirrored in moves from Washington Park to Woodlawn and, in 1958, to outlying Chatham, with its feel of suburbia--and summers at Lake Idlewild in Michigan. "Migrations," the middle section, departs from the method and focus of Parts I and III of Blue as the Lake; here, as if to catch his breath, Stepto becomes a conventional family historian. In "Up to Baltimore," his is a youngster's cameo appearance asking his grandfather for his side of the contested story of an alleged courtship trainride with the young woman who was to become his wife and, later, Stepto's paternal grandmother. But Stepto disappears almost entirely from the other two essays in this section as we imagine him poring over family documents, census records, and birth and death certificates in search of any official or unofficia l clues to his ancestral territory.

In between the interlude of "Migrations," Stepto composes the story of his life as much or more than he reconstructs family history. Along the way he has a keen eye for what Henry James called "the American scene." He brings a sense of scale and context to his personal meditations by registering changes in scene--the dual scene of society and self--as he sees the world and writes. Inspired by his cousin, jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Stepto masters the breaks and plays solos that are all the more telling for being so deceptively nonchalant. Usually the solos locate Stepto in familiar spaces become unfamiliar and somewhat menacing with the passage of time. He returns to Good Shepard Church for his Aunt Marge's funeral and, conscious of his Sunday best clothes and the money in his pocket, declines to walk around the corner to check out his grandmother's old house. At the funeral the now elderly scoutmaster with whom Stepto had youthful run-ins over Jim Crow, which still sear his memory, Fails to recognize him. To make matters worse, "the fact that, when it was time For me to speak, I was actually introduced as a friend of the family, and not as family, not as the firstborn nephew of the woman we were burying, made me aware not just of the corrosive forces of time, but also of what the young put in lace to create chasms between the generations."

Elsewhere, Stepto recounts the "blues ride" he is subjected to--and with a writer's retrospective, enjoys--in a "utilitarian van of the A2B Coach Company, a black-owned outfit that serves the University of Chicago by way of stopping half a dozen places where black folks might want to go." Unlike West Indian or West African immigrants who give new meaning to uplift, the driver hails from Arkansas. His patience tried by demands first for air conditioning, then for heat, the frustrated driver treats his passengers to a lament for Arkansas, where "'Black folks knows when they wants hot, and knows when they wants cold.' Then he half-turned his head and said, 'And the white folks are comprehensible!' " Stepto knows to let such scenes speak for themselves. Observing the icons of American culture, he also knows when to riff on the theme and variations of race and identity, as he does with wit and skill in relation to the "civility cards" proposed for visitors to Martha's Vineyard. His riffs sometimes lead him to new melodies, such as his choice of not one or another obvious race tee-shirts sold on the Island but a shirt from the South Carolina Sea Islands whose photograph is of woven, seagrass baskets. "Of course," Stepto observes, "the baskets speak of a culture and history, but Ellisonian that I am, I also sense in them an expression of possibility; provisions can fill those baskets, and the imagination can fill them, too."

The first two parts of Blue as the Lake subtly prepare readers for the three essays of the final section: "Black Piano," "Hyde Park," and the valedictory "Vineyard." The three are companion pieces in which Stepto tries to reconcile himself with his recently passed away mother and father--work of kinship he knows is crucial to the life and territory he is presently mapping out in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. In "Black Piano," a moving tribute to his mother, Anna Burns Stepto, Stepto discovers that filling in the memory gaps reveals the contours of family secrets but does not necessarily solve their mysteries. Her children grown, moved away and settled with families of their own, she and her husband "Big Bob" move into a Hyde Park penthouse with a crow's nest view of Lake Michigan and a spacious living room perfect for her Steinway black piano. Why in the world does she ship her long-desired gift from her husband to her son's somewhat cramped quarters in New Haven? What, Stepto wonders, does her gesture sa y about her life's diminishment and her sense of the coming years to be spent alone with her husband, his father? Recalling Ernest Hemingway's observation that the dignity of an iceberg lies in seventh-eighths of it being underwater, I sense Stepto's eyes cloud over as he watches possible answers slip away into ever deeper, murkier, silent reaches of consciousness.

Instead of engaging in what Keats called an "irritable reaching after fact or reason," Stepto pursues his deepest connection with his mother on the frequencies of music. When he lets down the hair of feeling and imagination, his mother comes swinging into focus, snapping her fingers to the syncopations of the jazz they loved and shared. But memory requires an unexpected act of tenderness in the present. "Recently," he writes, "while talking about my mother with my sons, I badly needed a hit of her, needed the sight of her tall thin brown self, swinging, fingerpopping, schooling me in what to listen for." And the hit comes, but only when his older son, Gabe, with almost telepathic consideration, produces a "perfect recording" of Miles Davis and Red Garland playing "Working." The old LP, Stepto writes, "didn't deliver." "Primitive audio," he adds, before his simple words--"then Gabe touched me on the shoulder as he will"--release indelible vibrations of feeling and imagination into the nourishing circle of his , and perhaps his reader's, immediate family.

With the help of music and his son, Stepto remembers his "first improvisations into companionship" with his mother. With his father he has no such luck. On the contrary, all is strained beyond any breaking point that might clear the air. In "Hyde Park," the saddest, most painful essay in the book, it first appears that most of reality lies submerged underneath the clear-seeming blue waters of conversation or discourse. Distressed, at first I began to hope for revelations of the unseen, but I soon came to suspect that paternal subterfuge and flight from the simplest contacts, never mind intimacy, together with an attendant filial shrinking into fidgety self-protection, are all there is between father and son. I know this is not the case because Stepto courageously makes the reader privy to his desire to "strike through the mask"--his own and his father's--and establish a cease fire zone from which each can tentatively, safely move toward the other. But propriety makes prisoners of them both. The son's respect for manners and the father's canny disregard for conventions drive them even farther apart.

Even though Step to does not know that he will never see his father a gain, that man's last words to him, spoken about Henri, a taxi driver--" 'He's very attentive to me'"--are a dagger in his son's heart. Before he can respond, had he any response to give, Stepto sees the blue doors of the elevator shut in his face--"as blue as the Lake," he writes, and, he might have added, as impenetrable. Having ever so deftly invoked the blues, Stepto ends with images of the underworld. "The cable behind the doors rumbled and mumbled, dropping my father down to earth." The future between father and son holds only "ashes to ashes and dust to dust," but Robert Stepto does not know this until word comes of his father's sudden passing, alone, in that same Chicago penthouse the very morning of Ralph Ellison's death in New York on April 16, 1994. Suffice it to say, I wanted more about Stepto and his father, but, as if out of time, the writer breaks off, his solo over. For now writerly craft must do duty for the exorcisms of a utobiography. Still, sensing the pain beneath Stepto's carefully chosen words, I would not be surprised if another rendezvous takes place with his father's ghost.

Last in sequence, though apparently not last to be written, "Vineyard" serves as both coda and commencement for Blue as the Lake. Both his parents passed, Stepto seeks the future in his grandfather's past. Musing on race and the American mix of races from his newly purchased summer place on Martha's Vineyard, Stepto has a moving vision of Grandpa Ocie Burns that is his book's and his own brown self's epiphany: "But when I consider these things now, and see him in my mind's eye bursting out of the Michigan woods, his copper skin aglow against the greenness of the trees and the paleness of the sandy path, I think I see a black man turning back the clock and living into all of his names, all of his races, not one." For Step to, his home on the Vineyard fuses with the Burns cottage at Idlewild. "Who wouldn't want to retire there? I tell myself realizing finally that 'there' is not merely a spot of geography. 'There' is a wholeness, a peace." Through the loving, candid, writerly work of recovery and discovery a g randfather's "there"-Idlewild--has become his grandson's "here"--the Vineyard, a place where Step to tends the vines of himself, looking forward to an estate-bottled vintage of well-being. Recalling his widowed grandmother telling him of "the ease of their [her and Ocie's] living together," Stepto makes an open declaration of love that is also an aspiration. "This is the ease I seek in my own marriage, and which seems closest at hand when we till our land, hike a path, walk the island."

Tactfully, without recrimination, Stepto leaps back over his parents' troubled marriage to the loving plot composted by his grandparents. And his personal geography extends beyond family to the terrain of friendship. He ends his memoir telling how, walking along the bluffs above Nantucket Sound, he sees an old friend drive by. The other man waves, saying, "Welcome home!" Stepto's pleasure at the easy but for him profound greeting is tempered by a characteristic, conscientious awareness that such unequivocal words are premature. There is more work to do. Like his ancestor in personal geography, Henry David Thoreau, he knows that "I am still in the process of being at home here." Undaunted, perhaps because of his honesty, he ends his book with words at once earned, suggestive, and promissory: "But that will come, that will come."

Friend to both the author and his book, I hope one thing that comes is a sequel to the lovely, blues-toned, multi-valenced achievement of Blue as the Lake.