Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406060123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ It is a hard place, the Roanoke of Brent Staples' ``Parallel Time'' - a place of drugs and guns, where his brother is killed begging for his life.
Staples' recently published memoir about growing up and escaping from a world of drug abuse and violence begins and ends with the murder of his brother here in 1984.
Blake Staples is buried in a Hollins cemetery.
He was 22.
``Blake was a drug dealer; he was known for carrying guns and for using them,'' writes Brent Staples, who is now an editorial writer for the New York Times. ``His killer ... was a former customer and cocaine addict.''
Brent Staples did not attend his brother's funeral.
``I mourned Blake and buried him months before he died,'' wrote Staples, 42, who had unsuccessfully urged his brother to leave Roanoke before he got killed. ``I would not suffer his death a second time.''
But the murder haunted him. ``Choose carefully the funerals you miss,'' he writes in ``Parallel Time,'' which his brother's death finally led him to write.
Family members here say they are proud of Brent for writing the book - even though it brought back some unpleasant memories.
``The truth often is harsh,'' said Bruce Staples, a brother of the writer. He said he understood why his brother had to write about Blake. ``That was something he had to get off his chest.''
``You know what? I was excited for Brent,'' said his mother, Geneva Staples, when asked how she felt about the book. ``He always loved to write, he loved to read. He had a lot to say.''
A lay preacher who spreads the Gospel in her Northwest Roanoke neighborhood when she isn't caring for one of her 25 grandchildren or three great-grandchildren, she said she laughed often at the stories of her boys' early high jinks in the happier portions of ``Parallel Time.''
As for the rest of it, she has long since made her own peace.
``The truth you can deal with," she said.
|n n| Most of ``Parallel Time'' takes place in Chester, Pa. - the industrial town where Brent Staples grew up - and in Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. and began pursuing a newspaper career.
Staples now calls New York City home. He has never lived in Roanoke, though he visited as a child.
But his roots here run deep. His brother was killed here. His mother lives here now, as do four of his seven brothers and sisters.
His brother Bruce's son, Curtis, recently was named the top high school basketball player in the state by the Roanoke Times & World-News.
Even Staples' father, Melvin, an alcoholic who is harshly portrayed in ``Parallel Time,'' was brought back here for burial this spring following a long illness. He had been living in Pennsylvania.
Staples' mother was born Geneva Browne in Hollins - where her family goes back generations. His father was born in Roanoke and raised in Franklin County.
The two were married in a Hollins church in 1948, their son writes in ``Parallel Time.''
Immediately after the marriage, they left for Chester - a shipbuilding center with a booming post-World War II economy. Melvin Staples would work as a truck driver there for nearly 40 years.
But in 1974, Geneva Staples returned to Roanoke, along with several of her nine children, leaving behind her husband's drinking and violence.
By then, Brent Staples - almost miraculously - was in college. A black college professor he met one night in Chester had persuaded him he not only could get into a college near Chester, but could get money to pay for it through minority scholarships.
Staples had no plans to attend college at the time, he wrote. He had not even taken college boards. But he applied anyway, was accepted, and excelled, going on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago.
But with his own rise in fortune came a distancing from his troubled family - a process Staples describes in ``Parallel Time.''
Back home, he writes, were drugs, violence, an alcoholic father, the ghosts of dead friends, gunfire. In his own family, one brother pulled a gun on another. Another sister became pregnant at 15.
As a child, Staples had once watched his father try to stuff a washcloth down his mother's throat.
Later, as a college student, Staples came home one day to the family home in Chester to find a brother raging through the house, needle tracks up and down his arm.
Staples himself was no angel. Even after leaving for college he played with drugs, including heroin once (it made him ill). By his own admission he impregnated four women.
But as time passed he visited his family less and less, making up excuses to stay in his dormitory room at college instead of going home for the holidays.
When his mother fled with her children to Roanoke, he did not follow.
Later, he avoided Roanoke for years after his brother's death - and is the only family member not included in the 1984 family portrait taken in Roanoke at the time of the funeral.
``I stand aside from this portrait, watching my family from a distance,'' he writes at the end of ``Parallel Time.'' ``This is the way it has always been.''
What the book does not emphasize is that the family's move to Roanoke - Blake Staples' murder notwithstanding - gave surviving family members here a new start.
Family members interviewed for this story said the move to Roanoke was a positive step - and that they have found the city a good place to live and raise children.
Christi Dillard, Brent's sister, said she wishes her mother had moved them here from Chester sooner. ``I think we could have got focused a lot earlier'' in Roanoke, she said.
Despite the rocky start detailed in ``Parallel Time,'' most of Brent Staples' brothers and sisters have settled down to jobs and families, their mother said recently. Dillard has two children and works at the VA Hospital in Salem. Another daughter, Amina Al-Hindi, is raising a family and attending classes at Virginia Western Community College. Bruce Staples - father of the basketball player - works for Norfolk Southern, Brad Staples for a fast-food restaurant.
Three of the Staples children - Yvonne, Yvette and Brian - still live in Pennsylvania. Brian is a carpenter, Yvette a mother and Yvonne ``a happy grandmother,'' family members here said.
|n n| Published early this year, ``Parallel Time'' has drawn international attention - much of it due to Staples' unusual account of how he once stalked the novelist Saul Bellow in Chicago. Staples also criticized Bellow, whose books he read and loved as a student, for his portrayals of blacks in his novels, plunging the novelist into a debate over ``political correctness.''
Staples himself, meanwhile, has become a mini celebrity since his book came out. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post. He has been scolded by The New Republic. His book has been mentioned in the Times of London and excerpted in The New York Times.
He has been on ``Oprah.''
Asked in a recent interview if he thought of Roanoke as a dangerous place, Staples said it had proved so for Blake. ``He was tied up in some pretty bad stuff.''
But the author also said he does not see Roanoke in a negative light.
In fact, Staples said, his brother probably only carried with him to Roanoke deadly habits he had picked up elsewhere.
Staples said he would like to do a reading from ``Parallel Time'' in Roanoke.
He still does not get home much - but he said his family understands. ``I'm just a different kind of guy. They accept that.''
Staples said he was a little worried at first about his family's reaction to the book, but that the response has been positive. He said family members realize that ``it was written out of love.''
``The family portrait taken at the time of Blake's death is the most complete portrait we have, and the only picture I know that contains the likeness of both my parents.
"My mother sits among my brothers and sisters, chin forward, a portrait of forbearance. I think of her not as a distinct and separate self but as an interception of traumatic events, like this one.
"My father's eyes are gaunt and livery from drink. His jaw is crumpled and sunken from lack of teeth. This stuns me because I absorb it all at once. I hadn't laid eyes on him in nine years, not since the time I found him asleep with the rifle across his lap. Even surrounded by family, he is utterly alone and contained within his skin. How like him I have become.
"My parents' features have blended to make each of us. The short torsos, the long arms (my father's), the high hips and behinds, the knocking knees and wide feet (my mother's). The faces tend from slender and rakish (Brian's) to wide and with high cheekbones (Bruce's, Sherri's). The same face can change from my father's (vertical and narrow) to my mother's (wide and expansive), depending on the weight of its owner. Yvonne is closest to my father in build, and in temperament. Her eyes are indecipherable. They tell you only that they will never tell you anything.
"I stand apart from this portrait, studying my family from a distance. This is the way it has always been.''
|- FROM BRENT STAPLE'S ``PARALLEL TIME,'' PANTHEON BOOKS, NEW YORK
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB