Seven Days: introduction and prologue

Seven Days is the story of one character's life as told through 7 days of his life. Not 7 consecutive days but rather 7 days stretching from his childhood to his dotage.

Each day of the week is represented along the way in order (Monday through Sunday)...some of the stories are told in first person, some in third, and one is epistolary...with the goal towards giving a (hopefully) telling overview of the life of one very complicated, utterly ordinary man.

First, a prologue delivered by our protagonist:

My name is Malcolm. Malcolm Eli Josephson. I was born black in a small town in Mississippi at a time when being black in Mississippi wasn't the most prudent thing to be.

I was the second (and final) son and the fourth (of five) children of Robert and Sarah Josephson. They had thought themselves done with making babies but then, after a gap of seven years, I was born. And two years later, my sister Alice came along.

My father coaxed crops out of another man's tired, overworked dirt until we were turned out with no fanfare or apologies. When we moved to New Orleans my father went to work for the government... delivering the mail...until he turned 65 and was turned out with a gold watch and a pension. He and his second wife retired to California.

My father taught me that both love and pain came from the end of a well-worn leather belt and he taught that a dizzying hodgepodge of feelings...love, fear, hope, anger, regret, recrimination, resignation... could be displayed for all the caring world to see on a seemingly impassive mask. He was angry much of the time...and gone (working or whoring) other times...and we never seemed to want to really speak to each other.

My father punched my mother once in the presence of my sisters, my brother, and I. Only once. She wiped the blood from her lip and the tear from her eye and told him in a cool, low voice that if he ever hit her again in front of her children that she would kill him.

To the best of my knowledge, my father never hit my mother again regardless of our whereabouts.

My mother washed Mississippi mud, sweat, blood, piss, and shit off white people's clothes because we needed the money...and because she wouldn't let our father take us out of school to work with him.

She washed the same things off our clothes because that was her real job...or so my father often reminded her (especially when he was drunk...or there was only pot liquor for dinner...or when he needed to say something that he had wanted to say to a white man hours earlier.) She was tired all of the time and we never seemed to have time to speak to each other.

When we moved to New Orleans, my mother mopped floors in a hospital at night after mopping floors at home during the day. By the time I was 12, my brother and older sisters had left to make their own way. The same year, not long after my little sister Alice turned 10, my mother laid down to rest.

She never got up again.

My father showed little emotion during my mother's funeral. And afterwards, he disappeared for three days. Alice cried in my arms for those three days but I found that I had no tears to shed and just rocked her and took care of her the best I could. Our oldest sister Amanda stayed and took care of both of us.

My father came back...smelling vaguely of stale cigarettes, old beer, and dime store perfume...without a word of explanation. It was not the first or the last time something like that would occur...but it would be the last time that I would care.

I graduated high school and went into the army. Alice got pregnant and went to live with my mother's sister in Tupelo.

My brother Robert Jr. made a life for himself in the military; my sister Amanda made a life for herself with a man much like our father. My sister Mary got lost in drugs...and then got lost period. Alice found a man who loved her like a queen and lived the life I would have wished for her.

My father delivered the mail... drank himself into a stupor on weekends...and married a very fat and very black woman with three little kids of her own. She made him become the husband and the father that my mother, my sisters, my brother, and I had always hoped that he would become for us.

I didn't see him much after that and I didn't cry when he died.

I left the army after four years. I let the government put me through college. I became a banker. And then a real estate salesman. And then a car salesman. And then a banker again. I made money and I moved to California and I bought things. I got married twice...and divorced twice. I had three kids and seven extramarital affairs. I have had sex with a total of 29 different women in my lifetime and I remember them all distinctly and fondly.

I have loved and been loved...or at least I think I have been...sometimes I was just not sure (and sometimes, truth to be told, I just didn't care.)

I am afraid of authority...and I cling to it just the same. I don't trust white people (or any other color of people for that matter) and I don't trust women to stay (and so, of course, my second wife was a white woman...and she didn't stay.) I don't believe in happy endings and I don't believe in the happy hereafter but I have known happiness from time to time..

I have made countless mistakes in my life and done any number of things right at the same time.

My name is Malcolm...and this is part of the story of my life...

On Monday, A Funeral