NJ Transit

NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor: A Literary Memoir

Susan Briante

A Life magazine cover from July 28, 1967 depicts the body of an African-American child crumpled in the street. A pool of his blood stains the pavement beneath him. His face lies in shadow, his wound unseen. His small fingers curl toward the camera. A headline proclaims: “Newark: The Predictable Insurrection.”

My mother drinks coffee in a light cotton housedress at a Formica kitchen table in Bloomfield. My brothers—then 6 and 8—play in the street. That morning my father left their two-family house for jury duty at the courthouse in Newark’s downtown. The summer is hot. My mother is pregnant with a child she has not planned. At night she will see the smoke from fires burning through the city where she was born. At night she will see the looting on the news. National Guard troops marshal in City Stadium. She will sleep with a gun in her bedside table. Her marriage will falter. She is 29 years old.

Carol Maso writes about her birthplace, Patterson, New Jersey: “I was born into a poem.”

I was born in Newark in December 1967. Not born into a poem, I found a poem for my birth city in a copy of New Jersey Magazine when I was thirteen.

“…white shirts… lace curtains at the front window…
automobiles lovingly polished… Dreams… encountering racist
resistance…New-Ark… knows too much pain… sees too many people
who aren’t special…”

In Nikki Giovanni’s “Song of Newark” I found a poetry made from working class imagery: railroad apartments with punched tin-ceilings; my grandmother, smelling of perfume and warm polyester easing down the bus steps; cobblestones worn through the pavement on Highland Avenue.

From a certain perspective, the first thing beyond New York City is New Jersey. You emerge from the tunnel sunblind. Train wheels clatter in the open air like a stereo going to mono. Sunlight dawns on fields, on concrete platforms, on Secaucus swamp grass and Route 3. A bridge opens to barge. Energy plant. Chemical plant. Port. Brewery. “Trenton Makes the World Takes” or so the saying goes. Say it for the whole state: “Kearny Makes Mid-Town Takes.” Planes descend over Route 80. Storage containers crown the hills. Spotlights. Clover leafs. Seagulls whirl above landfill.

The conceptual artist Robert Smithson, known for his spiral jetty project, referred to his own work as “com[ing] out of that kind of New Jersey ambience where everything is chewed up.”

My great-grandfather left a small town outside of Naples at the turn of the century, disembarked in New Orleans, then settled in Newark. For years, I wondered why he moved from Louisiana’s gentle coast to the harsh industrial winters of New Jersey. Then I learned that in 1891 eleven Italian Americans were killed in New Orleans in a group lynching.

My great-grandfather would sit on a Highland Avenue stoop and watch his grandchildren walk to school over slate sidewalks pushed up by tree roots.

Beyond the Hudson’s

Unimportant water lapping

In the dark against the city’s shores

Are the small towns, remnants

Of forge and coal yard…

George Oppen “The Undertaking in New Jersey”

Sunlight pulses through clouds, slides on a wavering projection screen. Train wire hum. Sit facing the back of the car. Polish Ocean Lines. Flemington Furs. Down Neck. Tagged backs of factories. Rivers we lock and drain. So much of it is branches, the fringe of airfields. Next station stop: Elizabeth. Storage containers stacked three high. Quarries, dumps. Old tires and birch trees. Rusted leaves. Duplexes. Conversations cut with shift whistle.

My father is a claims adjuster for an insurance company. We live by accidents and actuary tables. We move to Fanwood. Subpumps buzz in the basement, air conditioners in the windows. My father hangs a wallpaper mural of Colonial Williamsburg over green crushed velvet armchairs in our living room. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Vague lights of planes rake the clouds. Headlights scan the backyard like wandering eyes.

From a storage closet of Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, I steal a copy of the anthology Twentieth Century Pleasures and read Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones)’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”.

“Lately I’ve become accustomed to the way

The ground opens up and envelops me

Each time I go out to walk the dog…”

I read Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. I read Carol Maso, Junot Díaz, Ntozake Shange. William Carlos Williams reminds me: “The pure products of America go crazy.”

My grandparents passed away in the early 1980s. Now we return to Newark to marry or bury. Incense spills from a censer as the priest rocks slowly down the aisle in front of my grandfather’s casket at St. Lucy’s. At the Sacred Heart Basilica, I turn from the altar in a white satin gown to light a candle for the Virgin Mary.

Now freight trains rattle past my parents’ home in Edison. The engineer sounds a whistle three times before they reach the crossing. Three whistles stitch together the nights when I sleep under photographs from my childhood.

Now I ask my mother tentatively: “So could you see the fires at night?”

“I could hear gunshots,” my father tells me.

The bridge’s iron mesh chases pockets of shadow

and pale through blinds shuttering the corner window

to mark this man, this woman, the young eclipse

their naked bodies make—black, white, white

black, the dying fall of light rendering bare walls

incarnadine, color of flesh and blood occluded

in voices rippling from the radio…

Lynda Hull “Love Song during Riot with Many Voices: Newark, 1967”

Motion detectors eye every driveway. Every window is wired. Station stop: Linden, Rahway. In the suburbs, every gesture parents. From Hillside to Avalon. Wards and condominium associations. Pass the daycare center. Don’t stare at dead deer on the side of the road. Bus routes and HOV lanes. Railroad trestles, sewage systems. On stage in the multipurpose room, my niece sings “Feliz Navidad”. A black Camero idles in the high-school parking lot. A folding chair waits just inside the garage. On the Parkway, a blue video screen moves through the night inside a champagne beige mini-van like an advertisement for next week.

“Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities,” writes Walter Benjamin about Paris. Crushed between the cities of Philadelphia and New York, New Jersey is the most urbanized area in the country. Our cities, townships, and boroughs sprawl. Dense. Claustrophobic. Concrete. Every time I look at a map of New Jersey with its precise dots and boundaries, I laugh at the lie.

Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?—Robert Smithson

I leave New Jersey when I am 18. Chicago. New Mexico. San Francisco. Costa Rica. In Mexico and Texas, I learn to cross borders. In New Jersey, we learn to wade through a thousand crossed currents. Cables run under front yards. Wires section the night sky. Your story begins on the banks of the Delaware. My story begins in a brownstone on Highland Avenue. We string ourselves together. Internet pages exclaim “Weird New Jersey”. Rock stars sing turnpikes and thin white lines. Sidewalks slope and crack. May our stories never unwind. A phone cord dangles over a Formica table where my mother drinks her coffee. Your brick hand, my window. Our wondrous cities. Your brick, the hum of factories.

Not to say that we experience New Jersey in the same way. We stand before each other in glance and aversion. But we are unavoidable. I get off this train in Edison. New Brunswick, Princeton Junction, Hamilton… someone else will write about them.

“Here is a guide to ‘somewhere’ use the map to locate your position, note these particular sights and why they are important, see how beautiful or ugly they look, and enjoy this experience now and when you return home.” —Robert Smithson.

In his poem “The Gas Station,” Newark-native CKWiliams begins: “This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even before / Whitman and Yeats.” The poet remembers a night from his late adolescence. “It’s dawn. A gas station. Route twenty-two. I remember exactly: route/ twenty-two curved...”

Landscape always comes before theory.

Our borders stretch common as sidewalk cracks, as power lines hung over side streets. Tripped over a thousand times a day. The pitch of our voices tinges the air. A story begins: “From a storage closet of Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School …” Then another. A television flickers, a radio murmurs from a room down the hall. We tell our stories simultaneously. Let them never be untwined. Through trembling wire. Crow bar. Gunfire. Tongue and fingers. Tags on abandoned warehouses. The Suburban News. May our stories never be untangled. Even when speaking is not enough. Automatic doors sweep open at the entrance to an A & P. My mother calls my grandmother through burning buildings. Keep talking. Cars stall before the Lincoln Tunnel. Freight trains rattle past the glassy-eyed rivers speaking a rhythm, conversations of engine and porchlight.