The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born

By Genaro Smith

Whether Vietnam or America, whether 1963 or 2008, the narrators of Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith’s stories grieve the ghosts they have lost, and even yearn to resurrect those before their time has come. These stories are unified by the narrators’ inability to articulate what is lost, and so they must resort to a simple action. However, t

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946160447

Genaro Smith

GENARO KỲ LÝ SMITH was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1968. He earned an M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1999. He is the author of The Land Baron's Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives (UL Press), which won the Indie Book Award for best poetry collection published in 2015. His novel The Land South of the Clouds (UL Press) earned second place for multi-cultural fiction for the same award in 2017. He currently resides in Ruston, Louisiana, with his wife Robyn and their two daughters, Layla and Naomi. He has been teaching literature, composition, and creative writing at Louisiana Tech University since 1999.

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Table of Contents

Preface:

Dailies

Perfect in Parts

The Flag Above Me

The Beautiful Ones

Are Not Yet Born

Nothing to

Write Home About

The False

Flight of Angels

The Ugly Duckling

Acknowledgments

Afterword

Preface:

A Letter to Branford Marsalis,

Ayi Kwei Armah,

and My Father, Genera Wilbur Smith

When I attended California State University at Northridge in the fall of 1987, I entered with the childhood dream that I had as an eight-year-old: to be a writer. This dream had stemmed from the summer of 1977 when my parents took us to see Star Wars at Mann’s Chinese Theater. Ever since then, I knew. It was a calling I could not shake, a calling that prompted me to watch black and white movies the rest of that summer with my mother (it was how she improved her English), and I would open a notebook, take up a pencil and write the movies by recalling dialogue, character description, the plots and their sequences, even describing the settings, whether the barren, yet cacti plagued plains in westerns or the skyscrapers and trains in big cities.

This was what I did to satisfy my need to be a storyteller, for I was too young to have stories of my own, or so I thought. That was also the same summer I was made to read fifty pages a day: H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, the Hardy Boys series, Isaac Asimov, everything my father ordered me to read, and I say ordered because he was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. But I read everything assigned every summer because, as he put it, school may be over for the summer, but not in this house.

As I got older, I was curious about the other writers on his shelves: Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. But I was never assigned their books. Baldwin, especially, he would not let me read, and in retrospect, I understood his fears, his concerns; for literature is a powerful tool to influence young impressionable people to question one’s identity, sexuality, place in the world; literature can instill, cultivate, or even preserve angst and inspire rebellion. I wouldn’t learn this until later, but as the proceeding summers’ reading assignments tapered off due to my father’s pursuit of the American Dream—to buy land and build houses, buy dilapidated and foreclosed homes to renovate and rent—thus keeping him away for nearly half the day.

So as the summers’ reading lists became laxed, I picked up Stephen King’s The Stand, a truly remarkable apocalyptic epic, which solidified my childhood dream to become a writer. I read as much of him as possible, even told my parents for my birthdays and Christmases just to buy his novels, and I’d be fine. They rebuked my requests for only books on these special occasions. They felt I deserved more, and their idea was to give me as much of the world as possible. What they failed to understand was that those books meant the world to me. And so I read him throughout junior high and high school, and when I left for college, I wanted to be the next Stephen King, master of horror. But something happened that first year in college.

I signed up for an African American literature course, a 300 level course I took as a freshman. My eyes were opened. We were assigned to read Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet E. Nelson, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Dubois, and yes, finally, James Baldwin, and my favorite, Toni Morrison, and I lit up. I felt reborn like that late evening I left Mann’s Chinese Theater and felt awakened, never knowing I had been asleep for the first eight years of my life. It was during that semester I told myself, The hell with Stephen King. I want to write about my people.

But who were my people? That was just it. I didn’t know my self. I was taking a couple of creative writing courses during that first year at CSUN, so I embarked on writing about my mother’s heritage, her country, my growing up for the first three years in Vietnam. It was also during my undergraduate years that I had a passion for jazz music, and I started off with the greats: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley, and my favorite, John Coltrane. It just wasn’t his ethereal music that captivated me, but his strength to find faith and solace in Allah and Islam, a god and religion under skepticism, and to this day, scrutiny and bigotry. It was his obedience to Allah that made him go cold turkey to kick his heroin addiction. However, what I noticed from listening to his records pre-heroin era and his recordings post heroin era was the significant difference in sound, how the post-era sounded spiritual in nature, like a back and forth conversation with Allah. I learned that ever since his conversion, he, as he put it, wanted each note to be perfect, each note to be a testament to Him, and that each note should not be anything less to the One you serve. Each note should be perfect to where He is not disappointed. Or something like that.

From John Coltrane, I checked out the present-day jazz scene, so I listened to Branford Marsalis since he is from New Orleans, like my father, and I would listen to Branford’s brothers Wynton, Delfeayo, and Jason—the latter two I would see in New Orleans several times, and Branford that year I was turned on to jazz. The one remarkable album, though, was The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The third brother, Delfeayo, wrote the liner notes as well as critical essays for all of his brothers’ albums, and he explained the title. However, it did not stick with me. It made sense, something about the male African Dodo bird being tricked into nesting an egg for a female that he did not help to conceive, but he remained on the egg until it hatched. It was the idea that was and still is prevalent to this day, the idea of taking care of someone else’s baby, and in doing so, you come off as the better man, though a dodo. It reminded me of Joseph raising God’s only Son as his own. But for some reason that never gelled with me as being the true meaning behind the title. I was twenty-one. I was and still am slow. It would be twenty-five years later when the title came to me with great clarity by my nine-year-old narrator as to its true meaning in a dream I had, the very same explanation used as the epigraph for this book.

In assembling and editing this collection, I’ve come across some epiphanies. For one, the title, which I thought was originally Branford’s, was actually taken from a Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, whose novel bears the same name and spelling of beautyful. The second thing is that the novel was released in 1968, the year I was born. I’d like to think it was meant to be that I would use this same title for my collection, a title that was conceived the year of my birth, and it came from another continent of my other half, the origin of my father’s ancestors in Africa. I had always known at age twenty-one that I would use this title for a piece of work, and when I decided to use it for this collection, its meaning still hadn’t come to me until the dream where it was explained by Lý Minh, a fictional character.

A third epiphany I had was in dealing with the deaths of so many characters, I reflected on all the funerals I’ve been to since high school: some were accidents, some were by natural causes, some from diseases, some were murdered, and some were suicides. It has happened to all of us; we wondered what was the last thing we said to them, but I realized it was not what we wish we could take back, the one line we regret saying before we never see them again. It’s quite the opposite. It’s what we wish they could have heard from us instead before they’re gone. Or let me take it a step further: it’s what they wished they could have heard from us before they left this world.

So we go through these routines, and we mean well: I’m going to say ‘I love you’ more often, I’m going to remember to shake the person’s hand or hug the person before parting and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ or ‘I hope the rest of your day goes well,’ How are you doing today?, You look really nice today; I never knew how ________ (fill in the blank: hot, beautiful, handsome, damn fine….) you look, or even the feel good, do-right phrase, You matter.

But that’s just it, isn’t it?—letting the person hear something good, something endearing before he or she leaves this world, whether accidentally, naturally, or intentionally? I would like to think they return more beautiful than when they were here, but for the brief time they were here, we either failed or appreciated their beauty and what they had to offer us.

Dailies

—In memory of Vic Morrow,

Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen

It happens at the forty-third second. Forty seconds in, however, my two sons are safe in Vic Morrow’s arms, the helicopter’s whirring blade is exposed and stilled, and I know that when I thumb the PLAY button, the blade will continue spinning above them, its rotor a broken tail; sparks will gush from where the ammunitions team miscalculated the blast, the palms and tall grass growing out of the water will bow down, succumb to the wind created by the helicopter’s blade, and the water will wrinkle. For that moment, they are supposed to be safe and Vic Morrow is to bring my sons, Chien, seven, and Thanh, eight, safely out of the rice paddy. That’s what the script called for. That’s what John Landis had in mind for his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie—a bigot undergoes what it’s like to be hated and in turn assumes a heart.

But it has been twenty years since that day in Rancho Cucamonga where they filmed the Vietnam segment of the story in a hangar the studio constructed to facilitate a real helicopter, a hangar large enough to construct a body of water with reinforced beams, tarp, chicken-wire, and rocks and dirt dump trucks unloaded for men to rake unevenly around the bottom. The point of the rocks, I heard Landis tell his assistant that day, was so that Vic Morrow couldn’t get sure footing, that when he thrashed through the water it would look more believable, like he was truly struggling with more than just trying to get two boys across the water to safety. Twenty years and Chien and Thanh should be living in a house of their own, with a wife and a child or two barely out of preschool, jobs in which they wear suits, go to offices with their names engraved on plaques that sit atop their desks, or perhaps continue a career in film. But this is not the case.

I push the PLAY button, and the helicopter’s tail is a sparkler, the rudders of the chopper get entangled in the wavering palm fronds and the aircraft begins to fall on its side, the blade turning, turning and completing another rotation before it comes down like God’s hand and decapitates Vic Morrow and cleaves Chien and Thanh in two at their waists. Just a clean swipe through their torsos, their top halves turning with the blade and falling forward, felled like crop. Just as quickly their legs disappear beneath the water. And the camera wavers from its place, and off-camera there are voice-overs of muttered Jesus, Oh God, and Shit, and then I appear, just my shoulder, then my back, and I’m walking toward the man-made rice paddy, toward the helicopter lying on its side in the rice paddy, its blade dug into the pond’s bottom, stuck and useless. I even turn back to the camera, turn back to Landis and the others, mouth open, eyes blinking before stumbling forward and reaching the paddy overrun by crew members with fire extinguishers, and they run around me, flank the helicopter to put out the tail, rescue the pilot consumed in flames. Once I get to the grassy bank, I reach down, and this is where I PAUSE. No more. Not even Anh, my wife, has seen this part of the tape, much less any of it.

I reverse all forty-three seconds, and the helicopter rises from the water and rights itself, the blade rewinds to give back what it took; my sons’ halves come together to make them whole again. The tape reverses to where the sparks flood back into the rotor as the tail heals itself erect, and the chopper untangles its slender feet from around the palm fronds and rises, heads toward the back, and Vic Morrow’s progress is smooth, effortless as he carries my boys back to the opposite bank. The water begins to calm as do the palm trees, and the helicopter descends behind the trees. Vic’s pants as well my sons’ pants are dry, and they are standing in the grass. The lights merge like sunrise, and the grip stands with clapboard in hands, stands with Chien and Thanh and Mr. Morrow, waiting for John Landis to cue the helicopter. And it keeps rewinding to the beginning, and the TV screen is the color of an artificial sky.

You probably think it is odd that a man, a father, would be in possession of such a tape that shows his sons’ death, but it makes a lot of sense. There exists this need to go over what went wrong. The helicopter malfunctioned. The pilot tried to control what was out of his hands, and so blame must be placed on someone. So you go to court every day to listen to the testimonies, and you try to concentrate on the replies to questions, the cross examinations, but you sit there, still remembering the moments before the cameras rolled, the morning you woke up your sons at five in the morning so they could take their baths, dress in clothes your wife had washed and ironed the night before; and you sit and eat a bowl of rice pudding with your sons while you wait for your neighbor, the assistant to the director, to knock on your door because the limousine had arrived, and you think of the long ride to Rancho Cucamonga, and how you’ve never driven in a limo before, driven in a vehicle that allowed you to stretch your feet with your sons resting against you.

Blame must be placed on someone.

The courts acquitted Landis of third-degree manslaughter, of negligence for wanting to duplicate reality by having a helicopter in the hangar, not some prop operated by cables and cranes. Vic Morrow is not at fault; he is dead. That leaves me.

You have to understand, adults tend to think nothing can go wrong if they’re there.

The wives cannot figure it out. They say it isn’t your fault, that you did everything possible, that you made several attempts to bring back what you lost, but for days and months and years you know they think about it, think, It wouldn’t have happened had I been there. They think about what exactly were you doing? Did you turn your head, turn your back to look at something else? Pondered over what you wanted to do?—perhaps the upcoming work week? Anything else other than our children? And they think because of that one moment you thought of something you shouldn’t have, turned your back for a moment, even blinked, then it is all your fault. Some will say it, and these end in divorces. Some will not say it, but you know they think it in the way they sleep away from you at night, clinging close to the edge of their side of the bed, and you listen to the pattern of their breathing and wonder if they are truly asleep; or they speak less and less, and when they do, their eyes make brief contact; or they stay in another room they normally wouldn’t for long periods of time to work, to read, to listen to music, even to fall asleep.

That was the case with Anh, my wife, who, a couple of months after the verdict, left me.

There was no talk of even separating. We had accepted fate, each other’s doom of being childless. There were no signs of her wanting to leave, but sometimes it takes a simple task for the person to come to some decision. That was the case with Anh.

For months she stayed out of the kitchen, but one day she decided to cook sweet and sour soup, a dish that required a whole catfish, though cut into sections, tails and gills, eyeballs and head still intact. I have seen her wield a cleaver above her head, bring it straight down upon a gutted catfish, severing tail from mid-section, mid-section from head, and she did it with such precision, such accuracy, the steel blade cutting through skin, pink meat, and bone only to be met by the thickness of a chopping board punctuated both habit and skill. But that first time she attempted to cook, she had the catfish, wet and clean and gutted and laid out on the chopping board, and she stared at it, knowing what she had to do. The cleaver was in the drawer where it had always been, and it was knowing she had to open that drawer for a cleaver, for an item whose purpose was solely used for cutting meat into parts that made her slump to the floor and cry. Trembling, she brought both knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, and her spine curled. I went to the kitchen when I heard crying instead of a cleaver, instead of steel thwacking thick wood, and I found her on the floor. I went to her, went upon my knees to cradle her. I held her until the crying died, until her panicky intake of air settled and her trembling body folded into me, and on that kitchen floor I swear she grew smaller in my arms. Her body curled until I thought I was losing her, and the light of day, fading.

I can’t, she said.

It’s OK. I’m not hungry.

No, she shook her head. I can’t stay in this house when there’s no life left.

I held her tighter and asked, Do you want to see our sons?

O

How I came into possession of the videotape is a story in itself.

It was the third day of deliberation and my wife decided to stay home, partly because she believed it would not happen, and if not, why sit and wait for another day to pass, wait for the prosecuting lawyer to meet us outside the courtroom to tell us with shoulders shrugged and low voice to go home. Maybe tomorrow. I’m sorry.

My sons will never hear that: Go home. Maybe tomorrow. I’m sorry.

And so on that third day of deliberation I sat on one of the corridor benches with my brown bag lunch of a tuna fish sandwich, a Bartlett pear, and a small Tupperware of egg custard, and my thermos of hot green tea. Like the previous days, I sat there and watched men in dark suits and striped ties, pushing spectacles and bifocals up the bridges of their noses, clean chins and parted hairlines walk up and down the corridor along with women in blouses, double-breasted blazers, gold, round earrings, and barouches on their lapels. So much sunlight streamed through the tall windows that third day that I had to face the thick, tall, cherry wood doors in front of me.

It wasn’t until he sat down that I realized it was him, John Landis, and he did a double-take when he noticed me. He looked down the corridor, past the wide columns of sunlight to the other benches. However awkward it was, we both knew it would be insulting if either of us got up to sit at another bench.

I glanced at my brown bag and thought of starting my lunch, but it was only 10:30. Instead I uncapped the thermos and poured a cup of tea. Sipping my tea while sharing a bench with Landis made me realize something: he hadn’t been here waiting the previous two days, which meant the jurors came to a verdict.

I turned to him and said, They will not find you guilty.

Landis turned to me, frowning behind his big, round glasses.

What’s that you said? he asked.

They will find you innocent.

Landis brought his head back to nod, but it froze at the moment he was supposed to bring it forward. He sat in that position, stilled by what I had just said.

You are innocent and my sons are dead. What do I get?—my wife and I? I picked up the brown bag that sat between us and I slid closer to him.

What do we get? I repeated.

He frowned, and without moving his head, his eyes went from corner to corner before settling on me. I don’t think we should be talking, he said, and he even looked the other way.

But I remained seated beside him, left to stare